Family Romance

by John Lanchester

  Then there was the effect on her relationship with Bill. She loved him; loved him more and more as time went on, not least for his goodness and innocence. A man with a thicker carapace, a more worldly and cynical man, a man not above telling the odd lie himself, would have been much easier to lie to. As the miscarriages followed one on the other, this feeling grew ever more certain in Julie: Bill must never know. So there was a secret sadness – her love for him was undermined by the knowledge that she was tricking him, hurting him, and without his even beginning to suspect. She had been brought up in circumstances where it was not unusual to have to lie to those around you – to have some secrets, just to get a bit of psychological space for yourself, a bit of mental territory with a Keep Out sign. The convent was in some ways a training in lying, too, since life in an institution more or less forced you to have secrets and privacies of your own – and when Julie decided to leave the Church this feeling was intensified, and she began systematically deceiving the institutional body around her. So her training in lying was in impersonal deception, deception of a force larger and more powerful than you. She knew she could live with having committed that kind of lie – a lie to the family, to the Church. She began her life with Bill by thinking it would be like that, but then gradually came to realise that this new kind of lie was very different: she was lying directly, radically, to the person she loved most. He could never know the part of her she held back. The other kind of lie had a guilty pleasure to it, but this was bitter and hurtful and all too heartfelt.

  The secret had a particularly crushing effect on her relationship with Peggie. Without the example provided by her sister, and without the practical support she gave, Julie could not have left the convent in the way she did. (One cannot prove a counter-factual, but my hunch is that she would eventually have left somehow, some time; I don’t think she could have borne her sense of miserable trappedness indefinitely. But that is just a hunch.) Once Julie was married, she pushed Peggie away. She was living on the other side of the world, of course, which made it easier, and most of the pushing away was done via little sisterly signals and withholdings. But it certainly happened, and Peggie, who could have no way of guessing the real reason, was hurt by it. In her letters, Julie would sometimes talk about wanting to bring me up as a ‘proper English gentleman’, a claim which, apart from being straightforwardly not true – since it wasn’t what she wanted – made no sense at all in the context of who she was and who my father was. But it made complete sense when translated as the expression of a wish to keep her family at a distance. Later, when I was old enough, she would tell me that some of her family could be troublemakers, and I should be careful about talking to them and about what they said to me.

  This was grossly, bitterly unfair. Julie was in effect blaming her family for her own lie. Contact with them was risky because somebody might blurt out her secret. All it would take was a mention of the age of one of her siblings, or Dilly’s real name, or a date that did not add up. It could happen very easily. So she made it seem as if the family were the risk, as if there were something risky and toxic about them. I believe some of her family saw as snobbery her wish to get away from Ireland, to remake herself as Mrs Julie Lanchester, wife of a sort-of English banker, mother of a sort-of English son. I don’t think it was snobbery; I think it was a fear of exposure.

  The way Julie put distance between herself and her family had more to do with omission than commission. It was less a matter of specific gestures and moments and more a process of silences and absences – visits not made, birthdays not remembered, letters not written. (I would add phone calls to that list of things not done, but I can’t blame my mother for that, because calling Mayo from Hong Kong was a hugely complicated and expensive process, involving speaking to the local exchange operator in Ireland in order to book time for the call. When direct dialling came in, it was difficult to believe that all that drama and difficulty and local colour had evaporated.) But there were some specific instances when my mother was caught out in the act of distancing herself. When Molly Gunnigan, her mother, moved in with Dilly, the family agreed that they would send a little money each month by way of helping Dilly pay Molly’s living costs. Dilly and her husband, Peter, a mechanic, lived in a small house with eight children and did not have much money. So Peggie suggested that the seven other siblings would each send a small cheque, say £2 a week. But Julie could not send a cheque, because her cheque book was the property of someone called B. T. J. Lanchester – and of all the people in the world, the person to whom she could least be revealed as B.T. was the real Bridget Teresa, her sister Dilly. So Julie sent cash instead. (She could have sent a postal order, but that was a major chore in Hong Kong.) The cash was stolen in the post, and Dilly’s irritation at that – at Julie’s either not bothering to send the money, or not bothering to send it safely, when she was by far the most well-off person in the family – caused her to write an angry letter. Julie was furious when she read it and she never sent money again. Relations between the sisters never recovered. And all because she couldn’t use her own cheque book.

  As a result of all this, Julie had almost no real contact with her family for many years. I think she came to believe this new version of her family: she superimposed her new sense of needing to keep distance from them on her memory of her childhood grievances, and decided that she could not trust them and that they did not wish her entirely well. Just as she might have been growing out of her old grievances, she grew a new and basically fictitious set. When her caution about her family began to wear off, in the middle 1970s, she started to see more of her sisters, while keeping Bill and me at a distance from them. The usual pattern was that she would go to Ireland and visit one or other of her sisters for a week or two in the summer; after my father retired in 1979 she would go more often and for longer. Her youngest sister, Jane, her goddaughter, had been very close to her; but she never saw Jane between 1949 and Jane’s last illness forty years later. Jane was the last Gunnigan sister to leave the convent, and I think she represented for Julie her own sense of failure as a nun – in fact, in relation to her youngest sister, Julie acted as if there were something wrong with her because she had left the convent. Jane went on to work in earthquake relief in Peru, then in a project looking after orphaned children in the Bronx, and then in an anti-poverty project back in Ireland, but Julie stayed out of touch with her all those years. Indeed, I met Jane before Julie saw her again, on my first, mind-bending and eye-opening visit to my Irish relatives in 1981. She was an incandescent spirit, kind and warm and funny and good, living in a book-crammed chaotic bungalow near Waterford with Pat Brady, who had been her partner ever since Peru. She was upset that Julie had been out of touch for so long. And the real reason for the gap and silence of all those years was, yet again, Julie’s lie about her age. Sometimes people speak of ‘a gift that keeps on giving’. The lie was a taker that kept on taking. In Jane’s case, it took away the sisters’ relationship. The cancer of the bone marrow that killed Jane had been misdiagnosed as osteoporosis; nuns are prone to osteoporosis since they tend to undergo the menopause early. The doctors paid too much attention to Jane’s life history and not enough to the symptoms. When my mother finally went to see her as she was dying, Jane held her hand and told her, ‘You were always the beautiful one.’ It was a sad, terrible moment of reconciliation for the two sisters. Julie felt that she had gone to see Jane just in time. The deeper truth, though, was that she was irrevocably too late.

  Of all the selves she could have been and chose not to be, perhaps the central one was Shivaun Cunningham. The two things she had never had, when she’d thought about her ambitions to write, were time and freedom; these were now things she had in abundance, in excess. Most human beings live inside a role. Julie had been a daughter, a nurse, a nun, a teacher, at a time and place when these identities were powerfully encompassing, and left little room for a residue of self. Now she was a wife and mother, with full-time employees to do much of the wor
k attendant on both roles. Bill was gone from home by eight in the morning, back at seven at night, and he worked on Saturday mornings too. The amount of time for Julie herself was vastly greater than she had ever had in her life. There was nothing to stand in the way of her desire to write. She had once felt sure she had the talent and the stories to tell, and a writer was what she wanted most in all the world to be. And yet, after that promising start in London she never picked up a pen. She was finished with roles, and was ready for the thing beyond being a role, which was writing – since to write is, for a serious writer, to move beyond the role and the self into an encounter with something much more bare and exposing, unstructured and unsupported.

  That, perhaps, was the nub of why she could not do it – or one of the nubs. Her secret gave her a profound fear of exposure, a sense that if she opened herself up she would be shamed, destroyed, stripped bare. You can see the way her secret was antithetical to her writing even in the second of the stories she wrote and read on the BBC, ‘My Hair and Me’. That story is, I believe, entirely autobiographical, with a couple of small but highly charged exceptions, both of which concern the narrator’s age. She speaks of her ‘older sisters’, as if she were not herself the eldest, and she speaks of spending ‘seven’ years in the convent, seven fewer than she actually spent. The narrator also doesn’t have the background of Julie’s earlier year with the Good Shepherds, or the years she spent nursing in a sanatorium outside Dublin – so ‘My Hair and Me’ makes the best part of a decade magically disappear from Julie’s life. Doing the maths on the narrator’s age, it comes out as 19+1+7+2+2=31. Which is how old Dilly was, and how old Julie was claiming to be once she stole her identity. The story was written in 1960, after she met Bill, so it seems highly likely that by then Julie was already contemplating permanent, structural falsehood about her age, and perhaps even the identity theft that accompanied it. Any family member who heard her story, anyone who knew her, would know that she was not being honest about her age. Most people would think little of it, and say less. But for Julie, writing brought with it a terrible enhanced sense of risk. The fear of exposure grew. And eventually the fear of exposure kept her from writing. B. T. J. Lanchester, a semi-fictional self, smothered Shivaun Cunningham, another semi-fictional self, in her cradle.

  The other reason for killing off Shivaun Cunningham had, I think, to do with me. It might be the easy thing to see this as a classic feminist story, the pram in the hall as the enemy of promise, the ‘sombre enemy of art’ (to borrow Cyril Connolly’s lethal tag about babies). In this version, the years of looking after me are what prevented Julie from carrying on with her writing. But I don’t think that’s true, not least for the simple reason that Julie now had more time to herself than she had ever had. It’s not the case that the burden on her increased after I was born; once we had moved to Hong Kong, with me six weeks old, she had full-time childcare, she had financial support, and, in the key phrase of Virginia Woolf, a room of her own. She had means and opportunity. The thing she no longer had was motive.

  Julie had wanted to be a writer because she wanted to escape: she wanted to get away from home, from her family, from Ireland, from her own past; she wanted to be free. She wanted to be new, she wanted to be someone else: Shivaun Cunningham. But with marriage and a baby, she had done all those things, and in a way that was, to her and in the context of her family, even more triumphant. She had got away, got married, got (in relative terms) rich, cheated time and the wasted convent years by having a baby; she wasn’t Julia Gunnigan or Sister Eucharia, but Mrs Julie Lanchester. My birth didn’t stop Julie from writing because I was the opposite of writing, inimical to her ambitions, a succubus, the classic ‘sombre enemy’. My birth stopped her from writing because it fulfilled many of the wishes that writing had represented. She didn’t need to make a getaway any more, because she already had, and Bill and I were the living proof. Indeed, we weren’t just the proof of it, we were it. So the answer to the question of who killed Shivaun Cunningham is the Lanchesters: Bill, John, and most of all B.T.J.

  As for me, the main cost of my mother’s secret was not so much in a feeling that she had a secret – I never guessed that, not consciously – but in a feeling that there were ways in which my mother wasn’t fully present. There were closed compartments in her, places where you weren’t permitted to go, and where perhaps she didn’t go herself. I find it very difficult to get this feeling precisely into words, other than to indicate a general sense that there were things out of sight. If you told her something she didn’t want to hear, and particularly if you expressed a feeling she didn’t want to acknowledge, she would somehow disappear. If possible, she would do so physically – I remember when I asked her where I had come out of when I was born, she moved from room to room in the house with me dogging along after her, until it became clear that I wasn’t about to stop asking, at which point she literally ran away. I think I was about six or seven at the time. I may have asked again the next time I saw her – I’m not really sure, but one way or another I got the message that this question wasn’t going to be answered and had therefore better not be asked. Later, when I was leaving to go back to school at the end of holiday trips to Hong Kong, she would usually vanish from the airport – I would look over and she would be gone. ‘Where’s Mum?’ I would ask my father, and he would say, ‘I think she’s a bit upset,’ that being a perfectly adequate explanation for why she had gone off to hide. But that kind of literal running off and hiding was much rarer than its psychological equivalent, which was somehow to vanish internally so that you, or the thing you had said, or the issue you had raised, in some mysterious way no longer existed. The actual subject of discussion did not have to be, and indeed usually wasn’t, one of acknowledged importance. If I was going to be out in the evening, say, and needed to inform her of it in advance, well – that was a huge act of courage and defiance, a flung gauntlet, a reckless charge over the top. I would have to summon all my nerve to say, mock-casually, ‘Oh, by the way Mum, I’m going to be out this evening, don’t bother cooking dinner for me.’

  She would make no acknowledgement whatsoever – not a blink, not a flicker. That was how I would know she had heard, because if she hadn’t heard, she would ask me to repeat what I had said. My words were so outrageous, so wounding, so emotionally violent, that they could not be acknowledged. It would be like permitting someone to offer you a flagrant insult. She would be imperturbable, mask-like, a sailing ship not deviating from its course. The reason for that was the subject under discussion – i.e. that I was rejecting her. And that could not be admitted or discussed, so better simply to pretend that the possibility of it could not exist.

  That was how she seemed to me. As for how she seemed to herself, how she felt: there, what seemed like absences and silences inside her manifested themselves as depression. This cloud hung around Julie for years. It did not begin at the start of her marriage, but by the late 1960s and early 1970s, depression had established a pattern of coming and going, one made more painful and costly by Julie’s difficulty in talking about how she felt. Here, yet again, the subject was made radioactive by its proximity to the big secret: Julie felt she couldn’t discuss her depression without talking about reasons why she might feel guilty, remorseful, sad, and hollow. She couldn’t discuss it at all, not even with herself. It was only in the 1980s that she began to talk about the depression she had undergone, some time after the worst of it had passed. The first time she mentioned it we were watching the news together and a picture came on of Menachem Begin, unshaven and crushed-looking, in the grip of the depression that seized him after the cost in Israeli lives of his invasion of Lebanon became clear. I said something about feeling sorry for the victims of the war rather than for him, and Julie said, in her maximum-force mode, ‘I’ve been depressed myself, and feel desperately sorry for anyone who’s experienced it.’

  I suspect that the root cause of the depression was the injury she had inflicted on her sense of herself by lyi
ng. She thought of herself as good; that sense of her own goodness was central to who she was. Of her own free will, she had violated, permanently, that sense of who she was. She had destroyed the story she told herself about herself. And that led to a malignant sadness that lasted for years.

  As for how that depression seemed to others, it manifested itself mainly in an enhanced, weapons-grade ability to project her moods. Depressed people can be like black holes, sucking up everything around them. They are, more or less by definition, unreachable. There were long stretches of time when this was the case with Julie. She seemed angry and withdrawn, and it was not clear what she was angry about. I got used to this, in so far as a child can, when I was small – one reason why, when the time came to go to school a couple of continents away, it was less of a wrench than it might have been. I had grown used to my mother not being there.