Only

by Caroline Baum

  He had no business plan that we were aware of. There was no budget or campaign to launch the food on unsuspecting British households, to suggest how to cook or serve it, and no game plan for countering prejudices against it being a tasty combination of the two food groups many consumers were trying hard to avoid. My father did not consider advertising, had no leads or introductions to how key outlets like upmarket supermarket chains and prestige gourmet stores might be targeted as premium customers. It was, to use one of my father’s favourite expressions, a hare-brained scheme.

  At first my father filled a few small orders from Jewish delicatessens with a loyal but dwindling clientele of older generation Europeans. But several months later, boxes of rösti cluttered his study, their expiry date drawing ever closer. There is only so much rösti two people can eat. My mother made valiant efforts to add interest with fried egg, grated apple, ham and other flavourings, but the appeal soon waned. Potatoes were not going to make my father rich. Instead, they may have contributed to his demise, depending on where you stand on the factors that contribute to clogged arteries.

  CHAPTER 17

  Estranged

  In my late forties I did something that might have been more appropriate in my teens: I became estranged from my parents. After twenty years of living in Australia, I walked out on them in London following a turbulent visit and simply did not see them for three years. Emotionally a late developer, this was a long overdue act of assertion and self-preservation for me. I had never done anything so extreme.

  During my late teens and twenties, I witnessed my peers rebelling, but lacked the stomach for it. I looked on as girlfriends trashed themselves, stumbled incoherently through hangovers in class, failed exams, wept over abortions, pierced themselves in the first wave of punk. No matter how provoked I was by a sense of raging unfairness, my nerve always failed me. I was too conventional for revolution, and its anthems sounded jarring to my ear, raised as it was on classical music.

  Perceptive friends suggested that my decision to go to Australia was in fact my late revolt—choosing to go as far away from my parents as I possibly could to escape their clutches. But I denied the theory emphatically. Love had brought me here, then work and a new love had caused me to stay.

  When I did finally rebel, I did it out of sync, when everyone else was calming down, finding understanding and forgiveness for their parents’ failings as they navigated the turbulence of parenting themselves. Childless, I experienced no such charity or serenity. Each encounter with my parents left me roiling with fury and frustration. Eventually I felt I had no choice but to turn my back and walk away.

  I had come to London to celebrate my mother’s birthday—a significant one. Always optimistic that this time would be better, that I would not fall into old habits of childishness, I felt confident that I could maintain the equanimity that was a sign of maturity.

  Things got off to a bad start. Much as Native Americans would sit down and smoke a peace pipe together to establish cordial relations with a visiting tribe, we always began a visit home with a cup of tea. On this occasion, wanting to demonstrate good intentions, I offered to make a pot—a role that was traditionally my mother’s. My parents had only recently downsized to a new riverside apartment, and I was keen to show my appreciation of their fixtures and fittings. But the gesture did not go to plan. Within fifteen minutes of arriving, I had almost managed to set fire to their home. I had put the kettle on the stove and lit the gas. For as long as I can remember, my mother has had a kettle that sits on the stove and whistles when it has boiled. Now, in my absence, she had bought an electric model.

  The first indication that something was amiss was a ribbon of black smoke coming from the kitchen, accompanied by an acrid smell of burning plastic. Running to the crime scene, I processed the evidence: I had burned the base of the kettle, rendering it inoperative.

  My mother shrieked as if mortally wounded. I apologised, promising to replace it within twenty-four hours.

  ‘That’s not the point,’ she shrugged.

  ‘It’s my favourite kettle,’ she said, as if talking about a beloved pet or heirloom antique. I was not aware that people had favourite kettles because I assume people only have one.

  ‘I doubt you’ll get that model again, it was from one of my mail-order catalogues,’ she said, as if that made it a limited edition collector’s item.

  But the real damage was not to the kettle, it was to our already tense and precarious relationship. I was no longer a reasonably competent middle-aged woman, I was hurled back, as if by a powerful gravitational force, to being an irresponsible child, who, left alone, could imperil my parents’ domestic safety. How? My mother was very quick to list the possibilities: I could leave taps running and flood the place. Or fail to switch off the computer until somehow it overheated and cables started to fry, or do the same with the mobile-phone charger, which had caused a fire in a friend’s apartment. So many dangers.

  In the past, she had insisted that all electric appliances be turned off at the socket every night, long before doing so was considered environmentally responsible. No machine was to be left on pause or sleep, as she had read that there were risks involved. The fax machine had to be turned off overnight, too, which was the only time it was going to receive messages from people in different time zones, thereby completely defeating its purpose. She really believed the whole place was waiting to combust.

  A few days after the kettle incident, our celebratory trip to Paris unravelled with spectacular speed. The mask of civility between us fell swiftly. Conversations became barbed. My parents’ opinions and prejudices, trivial dislikes and discords, impatience with traffic and swearing over navigation caused an escalation in tension followed by protracted sulking. The atmosphere stewed like sour plums.

  One day, I had a panic attack in the car, leapt out in traffic in a sweat and ran back to the hotel, my guts churning. The cramps sharpened with a sudden flashback to infancy: we are on a skiing holiday in Switzerland. My bowels churning on the back seat of the Jaguar. I squirm, clenching my buttocks to hold in everything that is feeling increasingly liquid and swishing around in my insides like slops in a bucket on the deck of a listing ship. In the end I can’t help it and detonate a terrible mess of caca that spreads like hot lava across the red leather, streaking it with runny ochre. As I emit a plaintive howl of distress, my father swerves abruptly, pulling over into a snowy bank. My mother yanks me out, furious, strips me roughly of my cumbersome layers of ski clothes, catching my skin on a hastily tugged zipper, complaining bitterly as she rubs me and the seat down with handfuls of snow. I can feel her disgust in every brisk wipe. My skin burns from contact with frozen water while I am aflame with shame. Shit and shame. Shit and shame. Bawling, indignant, humiliated, betrayed by my body, I am, I understand in that moment, utterly unlovable. The car has a sweet faecal reek for days.

  Decades after this incident, I made it to the hotel in Paris just in time to reach the bathroom but was too sick to join my parents for dinner. My mother was resentful at having no one to dilute my father’s morose company or to distract them from their mutual boredom. At breakfast the next morning, she handed back the birthday presents I had chosen so carefully for her, including an album I had compiled of favourite photos of us together around the world. We drove back from France in silence leaden with hostility.

  All the way I mulled over the dynamics of the couple sitting in front of me: he the bullying tyrant, she the compliantly passive victim. As we crossed the Channel I worked myself into a bitter stew of contempt, my nausea exacerbated by the aroma of market-bought cheeses ripening in the car’s warm fug. As the Vacherin and Reblochon released their sulphurous vapours, I stifled mine.

  Within hours of reaching my parents’ apartment, the already suffocatingly overheated air from the cranked-up central heating became even more stale with tension and resentment. My eyeballs felt dry and I was constantly thirsty. My skin flaked and my hair crackled with static. Meals we
re eaten without a word being exchanged. No one asked me what I was doing or where I was going. No one said good morning or goodnight. My parents’ faces hardened into blank masks.

  In bed at night, the mattress beneath me felt like a hot plate, burning with fury and frustration. I was incandescent: radiant heat spread under my body for hour after hour. I threw off bedclothes and surreptitiously opened windows and turned off radiators. But the inferno must’ve been inside me, because it never cooled down, no matter what I did.

  I lay there and smouldered, thinking about the toxic way my parents spoke to each other, the nagging and wheedling, the sarcasm as corrosive as battery acid and infantile tit-for-tatting. A bitter banter of disappointment now had a shared focus for their regret: they were united in the complicity of disapproval against their Bad Daughter. One night a news item on television announced legislation allowing children to prosecute their parents for physical abuse.

  ‘So, are you going to report us?’ they sneered in joint provocation. That dare hit harder than a fresh blow.

  As a circuit-breaker, I moved out for a few days, pretending a friend had asked me to house sit. But when I got back, my absence had done nothing to clear the air. I was met with stony faces.

  At my wits end, I changed my ticket, booking an earlier flight home. No one kissed me goodbye when I left. It was the first time I had ever gone to the airport on my own.

  Within weeks back in Australia, I felt a real sense of release. Sorrow visited me specifically as a sharp pang of regret when I walked my local beach on glorious days—it felt like being poked in the ribs with a splinter of glass to think that my mother might never see the beautiful place where I lived. I longed to share it with her, to renew the ritual of my childhood when we had gone beachcombing for seashells together. That did trouble me.

  But I was free from the constant carping, negativity, incessant criticism and relentless judgement, implicit and explicit, and, above all, the endless triangulating, in which my parents played me off against each other. I felt detoxed, as if I had come out of rehab. I thought of myself less as a daughter, unmoored myself from that rotten jetty and began to float free, drifting towards a different identity.

  My mother recently told me that after my departure, my father said: ‘We are just going to have to forget her.’ Except he didn’t. He persisted in writing me injured, reproachful and bitingly accusatory rants that made me feel like a combination of King Lear’s Goneril and Regan.

  Ever since I had left home, my father had written me copious correspondence, mostly unsolicited advice about managing my finances or forthcoming trips. But instead of letters, they were always laid out like office memos:

  To: CB

  From: HB

  Re:

  This format made me feel like an employee, rather than a daughter. Each topic was numbered, sub-clauses indented with bullet points. The layout reinforced my feeling of being a minion to be bossed around. The tone was authoritarian. Often he wrote long meandering discursive essays to mark a significant historical date that he thought I should note (the Battle of Trafalgar was a favourite) or to express his frustration with government policy or some administrative malfunction to do with traffic or his bête noire, Heathrow Airport. Some of these lengthy despatches were sermons, essays or occasional raves about an opera or theatre production he wished I had seen or films he loathed. He also sent me copies of letters of which he was particularly proud. When they were addressed to MPs or the heads of statutory authorities, he deployed a formidable arsenal of scathing verbal flourishes and dripping sarcasm to illustrate his contempt for a policy or decision he condemned as ‘cretinous’ or ‘asinine’. As a relentless consumer and ratepayer/complainer, his tone to bureaucrats and ‘underlings’ was withering. Nothing was too trivial a subject for his scorn: he wrote a detailed objection to the makers of his preferred imported menthol mouthwash, objecting, quite rightly, to the impractical shape of the bottle, which did not fit into his washbag.

  I skimmed Papa’s letters for essential information but am ashamed to say that I rarely went back to read them in detail. And yet, I kept them all. They are in two big fabric boxes near my desk. In a bushfire, I would grab them as readily as photographs. A friend who saw me riffling through them one day marvelled at their volume and said wistfully: ‘Your father must really love you to write to you so much.’ The thought had never occurred to me. But later, when I read them, I was shocked at how forcefully my father’s personality jumped off the page. Reading his clever witticisms and word play, his polished phrases and well-shaped arguments, his diatribes and scathing critiques, I recognise the pride and pleasure he took in mastering so eloquently a language that was not his first. But it’s also a different kind of revelation: I’ve cracked a genetic code and discovered that my father is the origin of my own desire to be a writer.

  My mother rarely wrote to me. She said that doing so only made her feel worse about our separation, but when she did put pen to paper, she was droll, especially in her account of the intrigues and shenanigans of visiting Russians, which she recounted like episodes of French farce. Now, when the rupture of estrangement came, she accepted it as total in her all-or-nothing way. After being orphaned and let down every time she placed her trust in anyone, being abandoned had become her default setting—I was just the latest in a long string of betrayals.

  When I first came to Australia, Maman went into a protracted and painful phase of deep mourning that may have been depression, but she never sought help for her condition. Each return visit I made seemed to sharpen the pain: in the days before my departure, the atmosphere would build up to unbearable levels of tension. Gradually, grudgingly, she got acclimatised to the separation. But now, this break was final. Stubborn and proud, she did not buckle.

  Until I walked out, I had always been a harsh judge of those who cut off communication with their parents. I thought them heartless, selfish and lacking in compassion. But in those three years when we did not talk, I changed my mind.

  Some relationships are just too poisoned to be fixed unless both sides are prepared to take responsibility, compromise or seek professional help. I knew I had failed to be a good daughter in their eyes and I recognised what a bitter disappointment that must be to two people who had invested everything in their only child, but it was a failure I chose to accept.

  I did not know how long our separation would last. I did not rule out reconciliation. But I knew there was a risk that I might have to live with the guilt of that decision for the rest of my life, and I was prepared to take that chance. It allowed me to make some space in my head, without being tugged at and confused by conflicting values.

  Slowly I felt myself taking shape. My blurred edges became sharper, as I made decisions free of the soundtrack of interference that had colonised my consciousness for years. It was a sad state of affairs, but with such a porous sense of my own borders, I felt I had no choice. I could not ignore that I had inherited many of the traits that had brought us to this point; I recognised that I too was impatient, with a tendency to flashes of anger and holding grudges. Knowing the origin of these flaws did not excuse them or make them easier to correct.

  But gradually, with sustained distance from the source, I jettisoned tastes and values that I had adopted unquestioningly. It was heady not to have to pretend to enjoy classical music concerts. There was novelty in planning a less regimented holiday, discovering spontaneity and what could happen without a schedule, a map or a reservation. Gradually I let go of absolutism and definite opinions, cared less about money and material proof of success, rejected suspicion and anxiety as default settings. I avoided comparison with others as a yardstick of achievement and found the patina of things worn and used more appealing than the new. I made a conscious effort not to evaluate a person harshly and rush to judgement. I stopped striving relentlessly. It was like discovering extra lung capacity. I breathed deep.

  Some shared enthusiasms remained, hardwired by positive experiences: food was on
e of them, though no longer at the fine-dining end of the scale. And comfortable travel: I never lost my love of room service or a fine thread count. I had no desire to reject every dish my parents had served me. But I chose to season and swallow them in different dosages.

  Time blunts the sharp edge of resentment. You forget your grievances or their impact diminishes. You miss the opportunity to share a family joke. You wonder if they are watching the same television shows and how they are interpreting the news. If they too are feeling a little houdry voudry about the state of the world.

  Three years later, it was France, the scene of our rupture, that provided the scene of our reconciliation. My mother’s native country, beloved by my father since they had met there, emblematic of their initial optimism. When I came along, I was charmed by its language and beauty. Our regular holidays there made it feel like a second home.

  In the past, France had always transformed us. On native ground, Maman became more assured. Switching into her mother tongue boosted her confidence: she peppered her conversation with quotes from French literature and puns that demonstrated a playfulness and agility that she rarely attempted in English. Meanwhile, my father basked in the glow of idol worship, retelling favourite anecdotes about his Gallic heroes as we made pilgrimages to their shrines: Domrémy, the village where Joan of Arc was born, the châteaux of the Loire, the Palace of Versailles, Malmaison, the cathedral at Chartres: we paid our respects at monuments to human achievement, exaltation and ambition, my father always leading the way, eyes moist with sentiment, his tone hushed with reverence. In France, communing with the past seemed to soothe his irritable soul.