My mother took me for tea at the Savoy because we both love treats, and we both love cakes. In Sweden, when you serve a cup of coffee, you usually serve it with a little cake. My mother has a special way with cakes. She always has a good supply in her larder and when she pauses for her cup of morning coffee, she will lay out a small tray with her cup and a few little cakes. She will then sit down with her newspaper and take a sip of her coffee. After a few minutes, she will take a tiny nibble of her cake. She will read a few more paragraphs before she takes another sip of her coffee and carry on like this for about half an hour. If she has finished the coffee before the cake is finished, she will leave what’s left of the cake. Yes, she really will leave what’s left of the cake. Not if I’m there, obviously. If I’m there, I’ll wolf down my cake in a few swift mouthfuls and then wolf down what’s left of hers.
Whenever my mother and I meet, we always have coffee and cake. When I see her in Guildford, we have coffee and cake. When we meet in London, we have coffee and cake. Even tea and cake feels as if something’s slightly wrong. Once, we met for lunch at the café bit of the Wolseley and shocked the waiter by ordering coffee and cake just before our lunch. Don’t get me wrong. My mother’s not greedy. After a few mouthfuls of anything, she will clutch her stomach and announce she’s full. I’m the greedy one. At home I don’t always eat all that much, but when I’m with other people I just want to grab it all – the food, the company, the conversation – and gulp it down.
In the years since my father died, my mother and I have been on quite a few holidays and weekends away. In Bruges, we loved the canals, and the little bridges, and the bright colours of the Flemish art. But, most of all, we loved the fact that when you ordered a cup of coffee, you got a couple of tiny cakes.
In Stockholm, we had vaterbrod, which we used to eat at the sommarstugan or ‘summer cottage’ we went to every summer, and pepperkakor, the ginger biscuits you have to break into three pieces to get a wish. We had waffles at Drottningholm, and pastries at the outdoor museum called Skansen. We went to the opera house, and saw the opera of Queen Christina. I didn’t understand much of the Swedish, or much of the plot, but every time a character sang ‘Christina’, my mother clutched my arm.
In Vienna, where I took her for a weekend for a travel piece, we had truffeltorte at the Gerstner café. We had maroniblüte at Freud’s favourite café, Café Landtmann. We had sachertorte at the Hotel Sacher. We stayed at the Hotel Sacher. We were both quite excited to be staying in a hotel that had given its name to a cake.
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My father didn’t share my mother’s passion for cakes, but he certainly liked his food. He would sit down at the kitchen table, after a long day in the office and a long commute home, pile a giant mouthful of whatever my mother had cooked on to his fork, put it in his mouth and sigh. It was a sigh of contentment. Now he could eat the lovely food in front of him and perhaps go out to the garden. My father had high-level jobs in the civil service, but when he was at home he relaxed. It’s me and my mother who toil away pretty much all the time.
My father loved his garden. He would kneel on a little leather pad and listen to Radio 3 on his ‘wireless’ as he snipped and trimmed and hacked. He loved the sight of green shoots bursting up through earth, and of tiny buds opening into flowers. When I bought my first flat, an ex-local authority place on an early Victorian street that was basically a big council estate, he helped me with my patch of garden. My flat used to be the attic. The garden was so far away it felt like an allotment and I was often too lazy to go down and water the flowers. But my father put up a trellis and made me a patio. He planted clematis and ceanothus and marguerites. He made me a little sanctuary in a grimy patch of South London, because he loved flowers and because he loved me.
My father was with me when I went to see the flat I live in now. ‘I don’t think,’ he said, ‘that you could do better,’ and on what I was earning he was probably right. I don’t have my own garden, but there is a shared garden. Like the garden of the cottage in Sweden, it has silver birches. When my parents bought the house in Guildford my mother still lives in, my father planted five silver birches in the front garden. They were, he said, to remind my mother of Sweden. One tree for every member of the family.
Every summer, we would get up early to drive to Tilbury and then get a ferry to Gothenburg in a journey that took two days. My brother, sister and I would be wedged between packets of cornflakes and cans of baked beans. Food was, said my mother, far too expensive in Sweden, so she would do a big shop and cram as much in the car as she could. On the ferry to Gothenburg, we would eat the cheese sandwiches she had prepared as we gazed at blond families piling their plates high with meatballs, or salmon, and chips. Once, a man saw us staring at his three blond children drinking cans of Coke. He offered to buy us each one. My father thought that would be extravagant, but he said he could buy us one to share. So we sat there, each with a straw poking out of the single hole, like piglets sucking at a teat.
At the cottage in Sweden, when we had visits from relatives, we were allowed to drink läsk, little bottles of fizzy drink that tasted of orange or apple or pear. Throughout my childhood, fizzy drinks were a treat. On Saturday nights, when we were watching TV, my mother would walk in with a bowl of peanuts and a bottle of R. Whites Lemonade, as if it was caviar and Château Lafite. We would have to wait a week for the next fizzy drink and the next episode of Starsky and Hutch or War and Peace. What I was taught as a child, which I seem to have forgotten, was that things you want don’t always happen straight away.
We’d travel back from Sweden sitting on flat packs of Ikea furniture. I went to the first ever Ikea, in Småland, when I was still a baby, on the way to visit Auntie Lisbeth and Uncle Hans. As a toddler, I’d play hide and seek while my mother gazed at tables and armchairs and sofas she couldn’t squeeze into the car. We’d have meatballs. All year, we’d look forward to those meatballs. Apart from a hotdog by the beach, it was the only meal we had out. Those childhood trips to Ikea left me with a love of meatballs, a love of furniture, and a love of Scandinavian design.
When I want to cheer myself up, I often go to Ikea. It used to mean a trip to Croydon or Neasden, and the crawl in traffic managed to kill off an awful lot of the pleasure. Now I can just nip up to Tottenham in about quarter of an hour. I know a lot of people don’t find Ikea all that relaxing. One friend of mine had such a screaming row with her husband in the car park that the people around them ended up calling the police. When you see a diagram of an item of furniture in pieces and another diagram of it assembled, with no steps in between, or when you get to the last leg of a table and find that final screw missing, you do feel like calling 999 and yelling for a man in a uniform to come and sort it out. But most of the time I find Ikea like a soothing bath. First, I have coffee and cake. Later, I have meatballs and chips. In the time between snacks, I look at sofas, and armchairs, and desks, and incredibly cheap candles or boxes, which I then have to buy, and find myself almost tempted to hum a Swedish folk song.
My desk is from Ikea. My big sofa is from Ikea. Lots of my furniture isn’t. There is, for example, the bergere suite, with cane back and sides, which I saw in a street in Camden, snapped up and had covered and repaired. And there’s the pre-Civil War chest. I saw it when I went to the literary festival at Hay-on-Wye just after I’d bought my first flat. I knew it would be ridiculous to buy it. It was £430 and I didn’t even have money for a bed. That night, I dreamt about the chest and the following day I went back and bought it anyway. I had to sleep on a mattress on the floor for ages, and get a clothes rail instead of a wardrobe, but I honestly think my life would be poorer without that chest.
When I’m at home, trying to meet a deadline, or sending emails that may or may not be answered, I spend a lot of my time wandering to and from the kettle. Almost every time I pass that chest, I think: what a lovely chest! Almost every time I see my bergere suite, I think how much I like the mix of gentle curves in mahogany with cane.
And almost every time I see the gnarled old dairy table in my hallway, I want to run my fingers over its beautiful grooves.
When my friend told me about Airbnb, I looked at other people’s listings for their homes and saw they nearly all had Nespresso machines. So I bought one. I bought pretty much the cheapest one, but the coffee it makes is delicious. I make it in those little Italian glass cups with the metal handles, so you can see the crema at the top. One of the best moments of my working day is when I take my first sip of my first coffee. Every day I love that first sip. And I love the sight of the flowers – the tulips, or daffodils, or roses – that I nearly always have on my desk.
Every day, even on a bad day, there are small pleasures scattered throughout the day, small pleasures that you could, if you wanted, make yourself notice and count up.
When I see my mother, we always talk about the news. We talk about our own news, of course. She tells me about her book groups, and her coffee parties, and her lectures at the University of the Third Age. She tells me what her friends are up to, and who she has seen, and who she hasn’t seen, and the places she has been to, and the gardens or houses she has visited. My mother has a constant pile of books to read for her book groups. She has a constant pile of papers to catch up on. My mother is interested in everything. She regards a cancelled coffee morning as a gift from God, because it gives her more time to catch up with all the things she wants to do and see and read. She doesn’t want to go to bed at night because she doesn’t want to miss anything. This is probably why I feel the same.
But when I say we talk about the news, I mean the real news. My mother follows the news so much you would think she was on standby to edit Newsnight. She reads the whole paper every day. She used to read The Independent, of course, but when I left, she switched to The Times. She has TVs and radios in every room of the house and catches up with the news almost every hour. It’s almost as if she’s trying to catch them out. Well, Mr Edwards, at six o’clock you said this, and now you seem to have changed your tune. I would like to hear my mother argue with John Humphrys. I don’t think he’d get away with half as much.
At my fiftieth birthday tea at the Savoy, we talked about what I’d been up to, of course. My mother gave me a card, which had a photograph of me on Sky News. She said in the card that she thought The Independent’s management were ‘fools’. My mother has a lot of respect for authority. If a doctor tells her to do something, she’ll do it. So when my mother calls your former bosses ‘fools’, you wouldn’t want to be one of them, and cross her path.
I told my mother about my party, and the food, and the friends, and the presents. I told her about the book I was reviewing, and the pieces I was working on for the Sunday Times magazine. I told her about the conference I’d just spoken at and the workshops I’d run at a university. I told her about the parties I’d been to, and the interesting people I’d met. And as I told her these things, I realized that I hadn’t thought that things were getting better, but they were.
A kind of sustaining grace
Paula Rego has been described as ‘the best painter of women’s experience alive’. Her paintings are full of women who cry, and rage, and fight, and struggle. When I interviewed her for The Independent, just before I left, she said that in a painting, you can ‘punish the people you don’t like, who have been naughty to you’. At the time, it didn’t occur to me that you might want to ‘punish’ anyone.
I was pleased, a few weeks after my fiftieth birthday, when an editor from the Sunday Times magazine told me that they were going to run an interview with her, and that she had asked for the interview to be done by me. Her studio in North London still looked, from the outside, like the kind of place you might find the rotting remains of a corpse. Once you go inside, you find skeletons, naked bodies, monkeys, rats and skulls. You find, in fact, life-sized versions of the figures that live in her head.
Paula Rego told me that she had met her husband at a party, and he had asked her to ‘take off your knickers’, and she did. She told me that she had had nine abortions because she thought using contraception might ruin his sexual pleasure. She told me that when she was a child, her mother used to rub her ‘down there’. All of this was surprising, but for me the most surprising thing was that this woman, who was still quite frail after having breast cancer, and who had serious arthritis and a medical condition called diverticulitis, was still, at nearly eighty, coming to her studio six days a week.
She has been shortlisted for the Turner Prize, made a Dame of the British Empire and had a museum in Portugal specially built for her work, but she told me that her art was ‘always disappointing’. Her paintings sometimes sell for half a million pounds, but when she finished one, she just felt cross. ‘I never,’ she said, and she looked really sad when she said it, ‘do it properly.’
Most artists I’ve interviewed would say the same. When I asked Howard Hodgkin if he could look on his work with pride, he told me about the time he had been around an exhibition with the painter Patrick Caulfield. It was a retrospective of Caulfield’s work. ‘He just kept saying,’ said Hodgkin, and tears slid down his cheeks as he remembered it, ‘“not enough, not enough”.’
It was Beckett, in his novella Worstward Ho, who told us to ‘fail better’. There’s now a lot of research to show that failure is central to success. The American basketball player Michael Jordan, for example, has said: ‘I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.’ James Dyson came up with 5127 prototypes before he developed the vacuum cleaner that made his name. The psychologist Carol Dweck talks about the importance of failure in her book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. Most artists and writers I know would rather eat their own liver than go near a book like this, but they know this anyway. It’s because they have learnt from their failures that their work rises above the rest.
Art may console us, but it doesn’t necessarily console the people who make it. I love Philip Larkin, but his letters show that he wasn’t Pollyanna. Seamus Heaney quotes Larkin’s poem ‘The Trees’ in an essay he wrote about Howard Hodgkin’s work. ‘The trees are coming into leaf’, the poem begins, ‘Like something almost being said’. It isn’t, the poem says, that the trees don’t die. They die too. But every year, while they’re alive, they get new leaves. It’s the last two lines of the poem that always make my heart stop:
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.
Among the paintings Hodgkin showed me was one that seemed to have the same theme as the poem. It’s called And the Skies Are Not Cloudy All Day. One of the many good things about art is that it reminds us that they are not.
I used to read poetry and fiction all the time. For my last few years at The Independent I was so busy catching up with current affairs and researching my next interview that I never seemed to have time to read books for pleasure. A couple of months after I left, I bumped into the literary editor of the Sunday Times. I used to review for him before I started working at The Independent. ‘Right,’ he said, when I told him what had happened. ‘You’re going to review for us now.’
Book reviews don’t make you rich – unless you’re a very fast reader, which I’m not. The reward is what happens on the page. When I had my fling with the man I met at that conference, I was reading a novel by the American novelist Elizabeth Strout. He wasn’t very pleased that we didn’t get to eat until after midnight because I was still sweating over my review. I wasn’t either. I’ve been reviewing books for nearly twenty-five years and I still find it hard. But I am so grateful to have read those books.
Strout’s novel The Burgess Boys is set in a small town in Maine, but the way she writes reminds us that there’s nothing small about the human heart. The story that unfolds – of clashing cultures, clashing siblings, good intentions and quiet disappoint
ments – felt so truthful that it sometimes made me gasp. She brings the same sympathetic gaze to every character, and every life. ‘I think’, says one of her characters, ‘there is no perfect way to live a life.’
I read Siri Hustvedt’s The Blazing World when I was sleeping in my study. I had rented out my bedroom to a friend of a friend for a month, and was sleeping on a narrow couch and using a filing cabinet to store my clothes. The Blazing World is a brilliant, blistering novel about what it takes to be an artist. Which, the novel makes clear, is an awful lot.
I read Miriam Toews’s All My Puny Sorrows when I was staying with my mother, after I’d rented out my flat. The novel is about a woman whose sister has begged her to help her die. It’s about screaming at strangers in car parks because you don’t know what to do with your anger, and then getting drunk and having a one-night stand with your mother’s mechanic. It is, to echo the opening of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which the central character quotes in her final letter to her sister, about how ‘no matter how many skies have fallen’, you’ve ‘got to live’.
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We all have friends who turn up in our lives at a pivotal moment, friends who shift something in the air around us, so that the landscape looks different. For me, one of those friends is Maura Dooley. She literally set my life on a different path.
We met when I was twenty-six. I had just been through a very rough eighteen months. I was in serious pain. I couldn’t walk without wanting to cry. I had been told I had lupus, but all the treatments I had tried had failed. I still believed in God, but I hated him. I had told him to ‘fuck off’ and out of my life. I had lost my job, my health, my faith and now my Christian community. I tried to smile and look as if everything was fine as I dragged myself around, but I felt like the little mermaid, walking on knives.
The Art of Not Falling Apart Page 15
