by Tim Lott
Jean is not a good painter, although she has some technical skill. Ellen finds it hard to say exactly why. Perhaps because she is so exact, so controlled, Jean does not know how to express herself through her painting. Her ambition is to make an accurate copy, and her copies are good – dainty, compact, careful. But they are just imitations – imitations, like carriage clocks, of what themselves are imitations.
Neverthless, she labours endlessly to get the copy just right. She crouches over the painting, brow furrowed with concentration, trying to get it down pat. She reminds me of someone: a figure in a library, copying, this time, words from the pages of a book; trying to pin something down, to capture that thing precisely. Not knowing that such capture is never possible, she, I, we strain harder and harder, putting the flaws in the picture down to our own inadequacies. For surely, we reason, they cannot be actually in the picture itself.
Chapter Fifteen
In 1986, several events take place that shift the foundations of Jean’s world. Or perhaps they merely cause her to reluctantly inspect them.
Terry O’Dwyer’s shop, now the last greengrocer in Notting Hill Gate – the big supermarkets taking all the trade away now – is sold to a couple of young men on the make. They are upper class, Oxbridge-educated, smooth and tractable. They reassure Jack that the business is safe with them and that everything will continue as before. Jack, who is a trusting man, thinks that they are gentlemen and takes them at their word.
However, it is not very long before strange wrinkles begin to develop in the business. Bills that are due from market traders Jack has dealt with all his life are left unpaid for months. Humiliatingly, Jack has to plead at the market for extended credit, and finds himself continually embarrassed with people he has come to consider friends. He brings it up with the new owners, who smile and reassure him. It is merely modern business, they say, paying at the last moment. Jack shrugs. The world must move on, he supposes.
In order to ameliorate the ordeal of going to the market, he starts to pay the market traders with his own money, which he claws back out of takings later in the week. I try to warn him that this is a mistake, that the owners are clearly spivs, 1980s wide boys – I should know. But he doggedly refuses to believe ill of them and takes their reassurances at face value. However, he is clearly under stress. Jack hates uncertainty and feels very uneasy with people who are not straightforward. His overtolerance has been exploited more than once in the past.
The situation drags on and on. Jack decides to take a holiday and bring things to a head when he comes back. They go to Devon for a week. It is a good week. The sun shines non-stop.
On the Monday following, he drives up the Western Avenue and parks the van outside the shop. To his amazement, it is boarded up. He leaves the van and stands and stares at the wooden planks, as if his innocent gaze can make them disappear. Jack’s life at the shop – all thirty-five years of it – is thus ended. The shop has closed. All his customers – the eccentric old ladies, the dukes and duchesses, the TV people, the thesps – people he has known for decades, nattered and swapped anecdotes with, one entire pattern of connections, have been summarily wiped out. Jack, having been used to extend the shop’s credit as far as possible, is suddenly uneconomic, non-profit-making. He is crossed out as peremptorily as a figure on a balance sheet.
Jack drives home in a daze. He immediately tries to ring the owners of the shop, but there is no answer. They will not talk to him. One has gone abroad, the other is unavailable. He realizes that he has not even got a week’s notice, or a penny in compensation. Nevertheless, he assumes that they will be in touch concerning his redundancy payment. He hears nothing.
When he finally tracks them down, he does not remonstrate, never believing that anger is a solution to anything. They negotiate; it is insisted that Jack is owed nothing. He goes to the local law centre and gradually, over a period of eighteen months, he extracts a total of £5,000, payable in three instalments. This is his pay-off for all the years of getting up at five in the morning, six days a week.
And as for the remainder of his life, he’ll just have to readjust. My father is not bitter, although he is deeply disappointed, never having had a chance to say goodbye to all the friends who came in the shop for all those years. Nevertheless, he wastes little time on grieving. My father, as we know well now, is a practical man.
*
The other significant matters, for Jean, concern her sons. James turns eighteen in 1986 and I invite him to come to live with me in Notting Hill Gate. I drive over to Southall. James cannot wait to get away and I can understand why. The air of shabbiness and absence seems to thicken daily. Jack always makes a fist of it, making light of those who concrete over their gardens and let the pebble-dash crumble into patchwork, but Jean is sometimes nakedly upset. She had always loved the quiet pride in the privets and flowerbeds, the friendly competition between neighbours. Now that competition takes the form of the largeness of car or system of double-glazing. Not that Jack and Jean are immune to the appeal of double-glazing: the single aluminium windows that drove out the wood four-way-split panels, spread along Rutland Road like a virus, reached them two or three years previously. They had decided on Everest.
I arrive at the house and begin to pack up James’s boxes of clothes and records. Jean helps briskly. It does not really occur to us that this is a significant event in her life. Her riposte when the subject comes up is always, I’ll be glad to see the back of him. Get a bit of peace and quiet.
It does not take long to fill the car. Jean makes us a cup of tea. James betrays no particular excitement – like Jack, he understates his emotions. Then we head towards the door and get in the car. I switch on the engine. Standing on the doorstep is Jean, waving slowly behind the privet hedge.
I wave back, and notice, caught in the sunlight, that although her face and mouth are smiling, there are tears in her eyes and they are overflowing and dripping on to her cheek. It occurs to me, blankly, that I have hardly ever in my life seen my mother cry; over slushy movies, yes, but not over real life. Even now she shields her eyes, as if to hide the fact. I smile to myself over her sentimentality, give another wave and drive off. The fact that the house is empty of children for the first time in thirty years does not really make an impact; Jack and Jean are always, in their way, so independent, so concerned with living their own lives.
We drive off down the A40 towards Notting Hill. The luggage overflows from the back and gets in the way of the gearstick. This bothers me all the way through the drive home.
In the same year there is some good news from America, where Jeff is still living in New Orleans, having finally divorced Helma eighteen months previously. Jean tries to brush this off as ‘the modern way’, but she is upset. For her generation, divorce still carries stigma, and for her generation of women, the success of the family is a sort of unwritten test of the qualities of the mother. Although she never readily admits it, she is as much ashamed as saddened by Jeff’s divorce.
The good news is that Jeff is getting married again. He has met a woman from Honduras, Maria Zuniga, who has been settled in New Orleans for decades. She already has two children and Jeff is keen to adopt them as his own. When Jean speaks to him on the telephone, he seems happy and positive. There may even be a chance for the grandchildren that she is beginning to crave, now that James has left home.
She thinks of the wedding, and whether they will be able to afford to travel to New Orleans. But they will find the money somehow; to be at the wedding of one of her sons is an ambition. It will be a wonderful moment. The first marriage, she accepts, started as a marriage of convenience, although it hurt not to be asked to attend. But this time…
A few months later, she hears that Jeff has got married in a New Orleans register office, with a few friends in attendance. As with the first marriage, none of the family was invited.
Circumstances gather as clusters and pods. Consequences in themselves, they bloom and merge. I sit in the LSE’s v
ast library, poring over books like a monk. I feel ridiculously old and hopelessly stupid. The words in the books stare back at me, refusing doggedly to yield up their meaning. Occasionally, understanding comes and then it is like turning a rusty flywheel.
I sit in the library, sit in the library. All the books drift into one another somehow, written, it seems, deliberately to confuse and obscure, to protect the mystique of academia. On one occasion, for some course or other, I stumble across a book which is an exception. It is a text about working-class culture, written in the 1950s. Although I have never heard of it, it is a classic: The Uses of Literacy by Richard Hoggart. I read one part of it again and again, amazed at its perception, and I know that the writer has lived a version of my life. It is clear that, despite his calm, academic prose, he is writing about himself. It tells me precisely what it is that I am, and its truth scares me.
They wander in the immensely crowded, startling and often delusive world of ideas, like children in their first Fairground House of Thrills – reluctant to leave, anxious to see and understand and respond, badly wanting to have a really enjoyable time, but underneath, frightened.
I read on, absorbed.
They have lost hold on one kind of life and failed to reach the one to which they aspire. Beneath their apparent cynicism and self-pity is a deep sense of being lost, without purpose and with the will sapped. They are inwardly depressed by their constant suspicion that everything and everyone has been found out.
They are the poor little rich boys of a world over-supplied with popularized and disconnected information, and much less able to find meaningful groupings for its information.
For perhaps the first time at the university, I feel knowledge acting as a clarifying mirror instead of a distorting lens. The clincher, which I read in a breath, comes towards the end of the book:
He is usually ill at ease with the middle classes because with one side of himself he does not want them to accept him; he mistrusts or even a little despises them. He is divided as in so many other ways. With one part of himself, he admires much he finds in them – a play of intelligence, a breadth of outlook, a kind of style. He would like to be a citizen of that well-polished, prosperous, book-lined and magazine-discussing world of the successful intelligent middle class which he glimpses through doorways… with another part of himself he develops an asperity towards that world; he turns up his nose at its self-satisfaction, its earnest social concern, its intelligent coffee parties, its suave sons at Oxford… he is rather over-ready to notice anything that can be regarded as pretentious or fanciful, anything which allows him to say that these people do not know what life is really like.
I photocopy the passages and underline them and highlight them. Still, I think to myself, it’s taking it a bit far, really. The guy, I decide, is obviously really fucked up. Me, on the other hand, I’m normal. Unhappy, but normal. It is incredibly important to me to think of myself as something called normal.
But am I? A craving for distraction is the first ‘symptom’ that something may, in fact, be seriously wrong. I furiously seek out anything that will keep my mind from turning inward on itself. Music, company, the television. I am deeply uncomfortable when alone, but presume that there is nothing peculiar about this: it is the modern condition. If we could all sit quietly in a room and relax, society would collapse; dissatisfaction and inner stress were built into both human nature and the structure of the twentieth century. The only thing that seems odd is that the stress never lets up. I am never, ever properly relaxed or happy, not even for a moment. My fists still seem perpetually clenched.
I become vaguely aware that some sharp break with my accustomed character is taking place. My extroversion and arrogance collapse into shyness and a sort of nervous twitching. I am even losing that most English of gifts, my sense of humour, my ability to laugh at myself and just about everything else. The lodestar within, which has always told me what is true and right and sensible and ugly or attractive, which I could believe and trust more than all the reasoning in the world, has been eclipsed, so that I cannot even remember a time when it shone. I have become serious, endlessly reflective, tediously analytical, self-censoring, cautious, mannered, pompous. I am becoming a caricature of a middle-class fool and I do not know what to do about it.
My essays are getting far better marks now, as they become more stodgy and constipated, but some perverse perfectionism has overtaken me. Anything less than an A appears to be the most abject of failures. It gradually dawns on me that the person Becka has fallen in love with is gradually ceasing to exist and that only by an enormous effort of will can the ghost be brought back to life. Being with her exhausts me, as I am having to perform this exhumation every time. Periodically I leave her, and she always takes me back, as confused as I am as to why I have left her in the first place. While I am with her, the sheer life and energy and love of her terrify me. Without her, loneliness and panic cripple me. I have lost interest in sex; in fact, I find it hard to be truly interested in anything at all. There seems to be nowhere to turn. With each separation and each reuniting the stresses seem to worsen.
I cannot understand what is happening to me. I have felt this way for so long now, it seems hard to imagine that I ever felt any other way, that I was once a different person, with life and heart and libido. To my dismay, I even begin to feel cold and distant towards my family. I put it down to age and growing apart. But it is odd, because we have been so close for so long now.
Other peculiar observations crowd in on me, to be brushed away with increasingly desperate explanations. The fact that I spend fifteen minutes staring at supermarket shelves, trying to decide between one brand of washing powder and another, is simply a rational consumer in action. On another occasion, I turn the car around seven times on a short stretch of Westbourne Park Road: I cannot decide whether to go to a particular lecture. Eventually, I pull into the kerb and burst into tears.
A sense of disgrace deepens in me. Not only have I, in some obscure fashion, betrayed my own class and roots, but the new class among which I find myself judges me even more harshly. Teenage Marxists frown at me: what are you doing for the miners? for the ANC? for the homeless? My shameful answer, too shameful to actually speak: I don’t really give a shit. Also, my guilt over the pain I am bringing to Becka piles up like so much radioactive waste.
At some uncertain point I begin to pad out the long trial of library work with idle fantasies about suicide. Would hanging be best? No, if the drop was too high, your head came off. A tube train would be quick and effective, but upsetting for the driver and inconvenient for passengers. A high building would unquestionably be the most reliable, though the few seconds before impact would be nerve-racking and there would be pain, if only for an instant. I had no serious intent. It seemed to me little more than inconsequential mental graffiti.
Something was certainly wrong, but what? I found it increasingly difficult to speak to people now, whereas previously I had always been social and outgoing. I had panic attacks which made me physically shake with fear, although I did not know what it was I was scared of. The thoughts of suicide multiplied. North Sea Gas? But was it poisonous? A razor? Too brutal. Before I walked out on Becka for the third – or was it fourth? – time, she, knowing the depth of my unhappiness, suggested I see a psychiatrist. I gave one of my increasingly rare laughs and dismissed the idea as absurd. Psychiatrists were for lunatics.
I leave the LSE in 1986 with a good degree in politics and history. I do not go to the presentation ceremony; despite the fact that this has been the hardest task of my life by far, I feel no particular sense of pride. Every Tom, Dick and Harry seems to have a degree nowadays and although my parents are proud, I know that in the larger sense my family are unimpressed. As always, being good at abstractions in my class is seen as faintly ridiculous and pointless, a sort of indulgent game. I am once again beginning to agree with them. The three years have been so deeply painful and lonely, and yet I am not sure that I have learne
d anything of any particular value. My career with the publishing company is finished. My relationship with Becka is still stumbling along, off and on, more characterized than ever now by disappointment and anger on her part and growing desperation on mine. I know that she is beginning to hate me; my only consolation is that it is better than indifference.
Also, I am unemployed and I begin to doubt that I will ever get another job. I know that Becka will be extremely successful she has already been accepted on to a prized BBC trainees course – and I feel that she will, sooner or later, disdain my failure. I must keep up, I must push on, although I do not know where to. Ambition is, perhaps, my last remaining sentiment.
In the autumn of 1986, a new phase begins. Now the depression – which I do not characterize as depression, merely unhappiness – has turned some strange corner and become what I can only describe as manic.
Manic depression can be profoundly satisfying. In Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, there’s a shot of the psychotic Travis Bickle staring fixedly at the spray of an effervescing Alka Seltzer. It is an accurate observation of a mind about to collapse. In a similar way, all sorts of trivia now become fascinating to me – the steam rising from a coffee cup, the play of light on the ceiling, the flight of an insect, a crisp packet bowling down the street in the wind. I am fascinated by the play of invisible forces – wind, gravity, growth, decay. I put out an orange and watch it slowly rot as the days pass. The fact that it is transforming, of its own volition, in front of my eyes amazes me. I become fascinated by time-lapse photography, which seems to reveal a hidden world and process: spurting, unstoppable nature. Hidden worlds obsess me – I get books on the micro-universe of atoms and creatures smaller than the eye can see, on space and the infinities of matter present beyond the horizon of sight. I feel I am approaching some fundamental truth, that I am entering a new, heightened reality.
