The scary part of the plan to go to Norwich and look for a job was that I was now living at home with my mother, for the first time since – well, in a sense, for the first time since I had left for boarding school at the age of ten. Every other time I had been home – to Hong Kong or Alderfen or Norwich – it had been in the context of living my real life somewhere else, at school or university; I had always been in an institutional framework, with somewhere to go back to and work to get on with. Now I was at home until I could manage to get away. That was a source of strain from the beginning. Julie resented the idea of my being there in order to not be there; I was trying to keep my distance and avoid becoming so enraptured with home comforts that I would never manage to leave. No, that’s not right. The sense in which I was scared of being at home was less practical than that: it was somehow about a fear of losing the autonomy I had earned by all that time away. We were involved in a passionate struggle, and all without a word spoken. My mother loved having me at home so much that she hated it – hated it because it was going to end, and would end because I would leave her. So she tried to show, by a certain coolness and formality and adherence to boundaries, that that was fine with her: as far as she was concerned, I might as well leave right away.
On holiday in Derry in 1984
This was the longest period Julie and I had ever spent entirely in each other’s company. I wish I had clearer memories of it. The main thing I remember was a six-week holiday we took in Ireland together, with two weeks in a borrowed bungalow belonging to Miriam Bailey, an old Murphia friend from Hong Kong, in Courtmacsherry in County Cork, two weeks in Clifden in Galway, and two with friends in Buncrana, County Donegal. It was a good look at Julie’s talent for being busy. I’ve said that she never did anything, which is cruel and true only in one sense: in terms of being on the go, of outings and shopping and cooking, of arranging drop-ins and excursions and whatnot, she was a blur of motion. I am that rare variety of person who is content with an entirely unoccupied day – in fact it’s something I crave, in the same way I crave regular episodes of solitude. I love doing nothing. (It’s quite a rare love, I’ve noticed, even among people who describe themselves as lazy. Speaking as someone who is genuinely lazy, I’d say genuine laziness is quite rare.) I obviously did not inherit this taste from my mother, who, when she had time that seemed empty, set out to fill it.
As for her Norwich life, it was very like that – busy with things she had devised to keep herself busy. She had good friendships, though she never attempted to have a close male friend after my father died. She once, rather embarrassingly, told me that she was ‘mono-erotic’ and that she had never felt attracted to any man apart from my father. This may not have been biographically true, but she came to feel that it was true. She was of that generation of widows who regarded their lives as being officially over when their husbands died.
My relations with Julie were now difficult. Nobody tells you that the hardest part about being an only child isn’t so much the early years, when you are the sole focus of your parents as parents (I don’t say of their attention, because you may well not be getting that). The tricky part comes later, when the first of your parents dies. I dare say other only children, less emotionally illiterate and cut off from their feelings than I was, and also with older parents who might reasonably be expected to die soonish, are more prepared for this than I was. But I didn’t know what to do, or more precisely, what to think or feel, about the idea that I was supposed to look after my mother. It didn’t help that she acted as if being looked after was the very last thing she ever wanted. What this amounted to is that I was backing away at the same time that she was pushing me away, or pretending to.
In November 1986, festering at home in Norwich, I saw an ad for an editorial assistant’s job at the London Review of Books. In December 1986 I had the biggest piece of luck I had had to date when, after going for an interview, I had a phone call from Karl Miller offering me a part-time job in the LRB office at a pro rata salary of £8,000 a year. It was the best thing that had ever happened to me, intellectually and in other respects – but that is a long and different story. As far as Julie was concerned, it meant that I was indeed, finally and irrevocably, leaving home. The sense of disengagement and stasis – one of whose meanings in Greek is ‘civil war’ – between us was by now immovable.
On the Giant’s Causeway. My mother’s caption reads ‘John as Yogi’
If there was ever to be a time when Julie might feel in a position to tell me her secret, that time was now. My father, the person she most had to protect, was dead – and, as I have discovered in the course of writing this book, by the end of his life she had told him the truth. That happened, I believe, in 1979. A letter of hers to me mentions a ‘breakthrough’ in relation to ‘years of guilt and anxiety’. It was a bizarre thing to tell me about, since she had never before spoken to me of feeling guilty and anxious, or given me any reason to suspect what she might feel guilty about. As for anxiety, well, she was usually worried about something – though worry is a rather different thing from anxiety, since it tends to be pointed outwards at others; it’s another way of projecting a mood, with a big component of will to control in it. Worry is anxiety with an agenda. It is often a way of bullying people with love. Nonetheless, here she was talking about her breakthrough. I think what happened was that she told my father her secret, and he forgave her. The documentary evidence that she told him comes not long afterwards, in a letter from Bill to an accountant asking for tax advice. He gives a brief autobiography, and in it he says that ‘my wife is six years older than me’ – in other words, nearly ten years older than she admitted to being. So she must have told him. I notice that my father, in stating her age to the accountant, would not lie about it, even though he had no contextual reason for stating the truth. This makes me think that it was much on his mind at the time; it may have been part of the reason for Bill’s general sense of loss and disappointment at the time of his retirement.
Neither of them – but you know this – ever chose to mention the truth to me. The closest my mother ever came to telling me was not by dropping hints, or anything like that, but by letting me stay with Peggie – who lived in Norwich until 1973 – on weekends away from school, and then, subsequently, by letting me go to Ireland on my own. Peggie is tactful, and was aware that my mother’s age was not something to be blurted out; it was she, indeed, who told the truth, years later, when there was a medical need for me to know. But she also knew that I was to be told only in an emergency. Once I went to Ireland and met the family, though, anything could happen.
In retrospect, I’ve wondered why my mother let me go, given her fears about her secrets. (It was I who wanted to go, by the way; I was desperately keen to find out about my Irish family, and in particular to meet my cousins.) I think, for one thing, that she couldn’t have stopped me without making it seem highly fishy: if she was in contact with her family, why couldn’t I be? And I also think that in the end – belying the warnings and dark hints she had given over the years – she trusted her family’s tact. Dates of birth, in a family of seven sisters, aren’t necessarily the kind of thing that are bandied about; there may well have been a sense that, given that my mother was forty when she married, she may not have been candid about her age at the time of the wedding, and so full disclosure would not be entirely tactful. If she trusted to that, she was right to do so; it wasn’t until fifteen years after my first visit to Ireland that someone mentioned the age of my uncle John, and even then it was to my wife rather than to me, and by then I was so thoroughly indoctrinated to my mother’s world-view that I didn’t believe what I was told. In a sense, then, my mother was trusting the power of her own force field. She desperately wanted to keep this secret, and was good at suppressing things she did not want; so she felt that her suppression field would extend to Ireland while I was with her family, and help keep her secret for her. And she was right, it did.
The opposite may be true, too. She
may have hoped that someone would let her secret out, and she would be free of it. She would do nothing to let even a hint of the truth out herself; but she may have wanted to be free of her secret none the less, and have hoped, despite herself, that someone would bring the roof down on her. That would be only human.
But that didn’t happen: no one told me the secret, and my mother never came close to doing so. This was not, I think, out of a feeling that I needed to be protected; rather, she felt she needed to be protected from me. To myself, I seemed an extraordinarily mild-mannered, calm and eirenic adolescent – to a fault, actually – but I know, because I was told, that to my parents I had become a tyrannical monster of sarcasm, silence, eye-rolling, parent-despising, moral superiority, boredom, and argumentative radical politics. All adolescents are like that. It is hard work separating from our parents. For Julie, this may have touched off too many memories from her own childhood. She was always prone to see things in terms of a struggle for the moral upper hand, and that was always going to be a contested area. This was one way in which our relationship was not like one between a parent and child but more like one between competing equals. Children should seek their parents’ approval, not vice versa. Children should seek to outdo their parents, but not vice versa. Here, though, there was something much more like the competition to have the moral upper hand that is such a weirdly all-important factor in so much adult life, particularly in married life. (Why? I’ve never encountered an explanation for it. Why do we all so hate being in the wrong?)
This is why, in the final analysis, my mother did not tell me her secret. Julie didn’t tell me her secret, because if she had, I would have had the moral upper hand. She could not bring herself to give me that weapon; she could not, or at any rate did not, trust me enough. I find that a hard fact to take, but there it is.
Was she right not to tell me? Thinking this over as calmly as possible, I can see why she didn’t tell me when I was a child, or a teenager, or in my early twenties. By the time my father had been dead for five years or so, I can see less justification for keeping her secret. I can understand why she didn’t want to be judged by me. Julie was forgetting something, though, something which counts as a very, very important fact from my point of view, and something I try never to forget when I think about what she did. That something is this: if my mother had not lied, I would never have been born. My father had only two wishes for his own family life, when he came to have one: that he would not use money as a means of control over his children; and that he would have more than one child. Julie was forty when I was conceived, which in 1961 made it long odds against having one child, let alone any more. That makes the calculus pretty simple. If she hadn’t lied to my dad, they would never have got together as a couple, and I would never have been born. So I can’t find it in my heart to be too critical of what Julie did in 1960 or thereabouts, because without it, I wouldn’t be here.
Keeping the secret, however, is a little different. By the 1980s, the habit had become entrenched. She was never going to tell me, and she never did. It would have been a decisive shift in our relationship. Perhaps it would have been the start of a more real relationship, in that my mother would have been removing a degree of control in return for an increased chance of trust and intimacy. But she didn’t, and so we stayed stuck where we were.
I did make one attempt to shift it, or to clarify and express what I felt, at the start of 1987. I don’t remember exactly what prompted me; it must at some level have been the feeling that I had now definitively left home. Whatever the reason, I wrote my mother a letter.
I was intending to write less to tell news and more to thank you for having put up with me over the last few months so kindly and uncomplainingly when I must have seemed (and to tell the truth sometimes felt) to be at a very dead end. From Dad’s death I learnt that it’s always best to say things when you think of them and when you want to rather than to wait for a later occasion – so I thought I should tell you that I love you, and that if we have occasional disagreements and irritations, or if I seem thoughtless, it doesn’t alter the fact that I love you and always will.
Perhaps if we had been closer I wouldn’t have felt the need to write that; I would have been confident that she knew. Having to spell it out implied a degree of distance and strain; and, as Jonathan Raban wrote in his Introduction to The Oxford Book of the Sea, ‘people write about the things which give them trouble’. True. But despite all that, I’m very glad I wrote the letter. It didn’t have any particular effect on anything, but I’m still glad I wrote it.
As for how I know it had no particular effect, that’s because of one of the nasty surprises I had waiting for me when I went through my mother’s belongings after her death. I found that in 1988, by which time I had been living and working in London for almost two years – in other words, two years after I had left home for good – she put the house in Norwich up for sale and made plans to emigrate to Majorca. I’ve said very little in this book about my mother’s fluent Spanish, love of Spanish culture, interest in the Balearic Islands, and long-standing wish to live on the Mediterranean. The reason I’ve said so little about these subjects is because my mother spoke no Spanish, never said a word about anything to do with Spain or the Med, and had been to Majorca only once, on a week’s holiday. She liked the climate, which she found helpful for her arthritis, but still – this was a gesture of pure ‘look what you made me do’, a sulk or tantrum. The idea was that she would present me with one of her beloved faits accomplis. Then I would realise just what a terrible son I had been, and at the same moment realise that it was too late to make amends. It was her way of saying, with unambiguous clarity, that ‘I see so little of you, I might as well be living in a different country.’
This would have been her all-time definitive fait accompli – but it didn’t happen, for a reason that hints at an ambivalence on her part about making such a stark move. (Although I was the main intended target, I wasn’t the only one. It was intended also to show to her Norwich friends and her Irish family how little she cared for them, in return for how little they cared for her.) Nineteen eighty-eight was the peak of the last property boom, and the price my mother demanded for our house, £189,000, was a little toppy. I say ‘demanded’ advisedly. She had an offer for just below the asking price, and this is how she responded to it: ‘The price is £189,000. I am not interested in a lower offer.’
That’s Julie at her flintiest. It also gives a glimpse, perhaps, in its absolute, unbending take-it-or-leave-it-ness, of the fact that some part of her did not want to sell the house. Later that year the UK property market crashed, and Julie lost the chance for a windfall on the Norwich home that would allow her to buy somewhere nice in Majorca and still have some capital left over. Julie stayed on in the house in Friars’ Quay with too many stairs and a view of the river.
3
Maybe I could have had the same childhood that I had, and the same genetic inheritance, and the same degree of emotional illiteracy, and not have had psychological difficulties at some point. Maybe. But in the event, I didn’t get away with it.
In January 1990 I took a day off work and went to the Lake District with my girlfriend for a long weekend. The first day was very wet, not just damp but so foggy and saturated with rain that we felt as if we were actually walking inside a cloud. The second morning, the cloud cover had lifted and the weather was good enough to walk in the impressive new boots we had bought during the downpour the day before. We set out along the valley and then up one of the fells, towards the stream and waterfall that allegedly inspired Coleridge to write Kubla Khan. It was about three miles along the flat and then fifteen hundred feet or so uphill.
Before long we came to Coleridge’s waterfall. It was narrow and small and not overwhelming, but I was glad to have seen it. By now the cloud had come down again and we were walking through it; we could probably see about a hundred feet.
We started upward. Somewhere we lost our way and without realising i
t, wandered off the path on to a steep slope of scree. As anyone who has ever walked on it will know, scree is semi-scary fun to walk down, half-surfing on the slates as they slide over one another – I say semi-scary because there’s a sense that you’re bringing half the mountain down with you in a man-made avalanche. Walking up it, however, is no fun at all. You slide down half or three-quarters of a step for every one you take upward, and trying to hurry makes the slates slide faster, so increased effort results in decreased progress.
On this particular slope, I was getting seriously out of breath and longing for the top of the fell for which we were headed. Instead of doing what I should have done – stopping to compose myself – I pressed on, hurrying and simultaneously falling back. The effort was like those in nightmares, running only in order to stand still.
And then suddenly we were at the top of the slope, and equally suddenly – miraculously – we were through the top of the cloud in an absolutely clear, transcendentally blue sky. Because the cloud base was dead flat, at about a thousand feet, it was as if we had climbed above the world and were now cut off from it by this obscuring blanket of white. All you could see were other hills over a thousand feet – it was stunningly beautiful and strange, as if we had been transported from a low fell in the Lake District to the highest Himalayas.
Family Romance Page 32
