Wheels Within Wheels

by Dervla Murphy

  The most astonishing thing about this period is how much I continued to enjoy life. My desperate or resentful moods became more frequent but were always brief. Human beings can adapt to almost anything and, though my adaptability was eventually to be overstrained, there was no day when I did not revel simply in existing. All my life I had felt grateful (to whom I knew not) for the gift of existence, and I felt no less so now. I discovered that one does not have to be happy, successful or fulfilled to enjoy living. Even the bitterest despair and frustration can at a deep level be relished as part of the human experience. And so is generated a basic content which survives the surface discontents provoked by everyday miseries. Thus I was for a long time fundamentally resigned to my situation; I could not otherwise have borne it. I had none of the supports that would have been available to a devout Christian yet I sensed a certain symmetry in the background. I believed, confusedly yet firmly, that Fate organises things constructively and that in some obscure way what now seemed so wrong and arid would be proved right and fruitful.

  On a different (or perhaps not so different) level I had, for my weakest moments, an absurd little consolation which I mentioned not even to Mark. Although I have never been superstitious I could not help being comforted by my mother’s story of a Romany woman she had met in Somerset when she was nineteen, before she knew my father. This gypsy foretold that she would marry a small, slim, dark man, and move away from her birthplace to live among many trees, and endure a very long illness – and have only one child, a daughter who would be famous. Every prediction but the last had by now come true. And though I did not in the least want to be famous, I hoped – and in my heart believed – that this fortune-teller’s blanket-term covered authorship.

  15

  During the winter of 1956-57 the rapid and conclusive disintegration of our house coincided with the maturing of my father’s life insurance policy; so we decided to build a bungalow on the outskirts of Lismore. North, the site overlooked the Blackwater valley where wooded ridges rise from the river to the foot of the mountains: south, it overlooked placid fields, bounded by fine old trees, and against the sky lay another wooded ridge, the watershed between the valleys of the Bride and the Blackwater. We were within five minutes’ brisk walk of the town yet only one other building was in sight – the farm at the end of the long field that sloped down behind us to the river.

  Significantly, our building activities temporarily improved the domestic atmosphere. My mother, who had architecture in her blood, designed the house herself with the aid of a local engineer. And, having found this outlet for her energies and talents, she became much easier to deal with. We drew closer than we had been for years as we discussed colour-schemes, floorings and cupboard spaces.

  The decision to build delighted me. I had no grudge against the ruin that had been my home for as long as I could remember, but to own a house in Lismore would confirm my sense of belonging to the Blackwater valley. I visited the site often and, wandering through the embryonic rooms, wondered to what events they would form the background during the next half-century or so. I felt quite sure that here was my home for the rest of my life and this certainty was soothing.

  On August 31, 1957, my father paid the last instalment of the builder’s bill and next day we moved in. It was characteristic of my parents that the house did not seem very modern by contemporary standards. (Now it is often mistaken for a’30s dwelling.) Money was severely limited and all the emphasis was on sound basic materials. Not a shilling was left over for frills and to this day the pine floors remain uncarpeted. But in twenty years the place has needed no structural repairs and it seems unlikely to do so within my lifetime.

  Our new house brought about a providential widening of my tiny social circle. While it was being built a mutual acquaintance had introduced me to an English couple who for ten years had been farming near Lismore. I found the Pearces unusually congenial but, though their invitation to call any time was plainly sincere, I felt diffident about accepting it. (My restricted life had left me a very gauche twenty-five-year old.) However, I eventually decided to use our move as an excuse to meet them again. They came to a house-warming supper, were introduced to my parents and asked me back. This time I readily accepted; I had by then realised that the Pearces were – on more than one count – in a somewhat similar situation to the Murphys. Like ourselves, they lacked an obvious social niche in West Waterford. Neither came of farming stock; Brian’s father had been a business man, Daphne’s an Anglican clergyman. And though they were on excellent terms with the neighbourhood, and had many friends in various parts of Ireland, they had found nobody on their own wavelength in the Lismore area. This lack was more constricting for Daphne than for Brian. He, as an indefatigable member of the National Farmers’ Association, had for years been well integrated with the local community.

  Daphne’s interests and skills ranged from stock-breeding – at which she was outstandingly successful – to painting, literature and philosophy. She was a most unlikely person to be found farming on a remote Irish hillside and she clearly considered me an equally unlikely person to be found living in a bungalow outside Lismore. We needed each other and within a month of that supper party I was visiting the Pearces twice a week. There was no gradual process of assimilation; I had at once become a member of the family.

  The Pearces, with their two children aged fifteen and five, provided a substitute for the normal family life I had never known. Yet the Pearce family could be described as normal only in contrast to the Murphy household’s painfully distorted affections. I had suspected, when we first met, that they too had their problems and soon I was as immersed in those as the Pearces were in mine. For all concerned, this diversification of tensions and worries was helpful and we supported each other equally during the next gruelling year.

  Daphne – my first woman friend – had entered my life at such an appropriate time that our meeting might have been stage-managed by some amiable angel. On one level we seemed to have known each other for a lifetime, so quickly did we become close. Yet, as a fresh observer of the Murphy scene, Daphne was able to provide objective insights and down-to-earth advice such as neither Mark nor Godfrey was capable of, both having been too close to my problems for too long.

  During 1958 I needed every sort of moral support I could get. By Easter I had begun to worry about Godfrey’s worsening smoker’s cough and new irritability. But when I suggested a check-up he assured me most persuasively that he felt perfectly fit and I stopped worrying – consciously.

  Meanwhile things had become almost intolerable at home. Since the onset of my mother’s kidney complaint in 1956 I had not had one unbroken night’s sleep. Every night I was roused once, in the small hours – and often twice, and sometimes thrice. Each break kept me up for at least an hour of torturing drowsiness and it was not possible for me to lie on in the morning because by seven-thirty my mother would once more need the bedpan.

  My father, who slept on a folding divan bed in my mother’s room, was also disturbed every night – needlessly – and the obvious solution was for me to give up my bedroom to him. No logical argument could be opposed to this move, yet for me it represented the erosion of the last fragment of my liberty. I had never, except at school, had to share a bedroom with anyone and the effect of this apparently trivial change in our domestic arrangements was devastating. Until then, nights had been a time of unwinding, despite the strain of being regularly awakened out of a deep sleep. If too overwrought to sleep, I could read, or write letters, into the small hours. (My concentration had been so diminished by lack of sleep that I had given up attempting to write anything more than letters.) Above all I could feel that I was myself, in the solitude of my personal refuge. At the end of the day I needed, desperately, to be alone, having spent so many fraught hours in the dank shadow of my mother’s inner disintegration. I often felt utterly unnerved by what then looked to me like a complete personality change though I now see it as a mere shift of emphasis. U
nder the pressure of steadily deteriorating health, certain traits which had always been present, but either suppressed or used constructively, were now being released and used destructively.

  Mark urged me not to give up my bedroom, however unreasonable my attitude might seem, and to refuse to attend to my mother at night – thus forcing her either to reduce her barley-water intake in the evenings or to employ a night nurse. He argued that already I was near breaking-point and that for everybody’s sake I should refuse to be bullied. Even from him I resented the use of ‘bullied’ in relation to my mother’s behaviour. Yet it was justified, though her methods were so subtle that they went undetected by me.

  I longed to take Mark’s advice but was incapable of doing so. This was partly because my mother would have made me feel so guilty had I defied her, and partly because retaining my own room would have been so unfair on my father. Thus I allowed a routine to become established that almost destroyed me. I could no longer read in bed – or between chores, because my mother kept me so busy all day. Only by the exercise of considerable ingenuity could I get through a few chapters while preparing vegetables or washing clothes or polishing silver. (When up against it one discovers how much can be accomplished ‘blind’.) Worst of all – because I had become so dependent on comforting visits from my friends – my mother developed a virulent, jealous hatred of those who were closest to me. Within five minutes, at most, of my receiving Mark or Daphne or Brian, she would summon me and demand elaborate attentions calculated to last longer than my visitor could wait. Occasionally her need was genuine, but usually it was simulated – and I knew this. Yet I could not fully accept my friends’ verdict: that now her illness was not only physical. The rational part of me assented, but to act on the basis of this fact was impossible. Emotionally I resisted the thought of my mother’s mind being diseased, though had I been able to think clearly I would have seen that the choice lay between this and a much more terrible form of spiritual corruption. So I persisted in treating her as an antagonist rather than as a patient – which proves that during those years I, too, was mentally unsound.

  My mother and I were the most obvious victims of the Murphy situation, but my father must have suffered as much as either of us. While we went our tormented, obsessive ways, at least deriving some perverse relief from being active in our campaign of mutual destruction, he was a helpless, passive, sane observer, pitying us both yet unable directly to help either of us in our relationship with the other. Of course he was still helping my mother in other ways and indirectly he did help me, for I was aware of his unspoken sympathy. Our persisting inability to communicate and his loyalty to my mother prevented him from voicing this sympathy. But the older I grew the more pronounced became our strange, telepathic understanding – defying years of estrangement with the knowledge that blood has of blood.

  This estrangement was now brought into my feud with my mother. For years she had accepted it sadly and tactfully, but from 1958 onwards she contemptuously upbraided me, almost every day, for my seeming indifference and ingratitude towards her beloved husband. My friends blamed my father for not intervening to free me from the maternal grip and when goaded beyond reason and justice I, too, used to condemn his pusillanimity. But this was unfair. My father, who had his own sort of moral courage and endurance, had always lacked decisiveness in his relationship with his wife. This had helped, in the past, to make their marriage the improbable success that it was; now it meant that he was no less trapped than myself. For him to appear to ‘take my side’ would have seemed a betrayal to my mother – though ultimately it would have been of as much benefit to her as to me – and like myself he was paralysed, at this stage, by misplaced compassion.

  In my memory, August will always be the month most closely associated with Godfrey. In August 1949 we first drove to Goat Island, in August 1952 we first made love – and in August 1958 he told me that at last he was going to Peru. I did not believe him. For years he had been planning to explore Inca sites – archaeology was his subject – ‘When I feel better about things.’ This meant when he had overcome his self-consciousness about his appearance; and I had noticed no recent improvement in that respect. We looked at each other in silence. And for an instant – it was a weird time-shift, not at all like a memory – I seemed to be back by Bayl Lough on the day when he had first looked at me with love. I knew that he knew that I did not believe him. I moved away, across the room. My heart was pounding with fear and I was shaking all over, uncontrollably. Then my fear was displaced by a desolating grief because he would not confide in me. I felt reduced again to the status of his young friend – the child whom he had to protect. Or was he protecting himself? In any case I would play it his way – as I always had. I left him ten minutes later, an hour earlier than necessary. We said goodbye casually at the gate, in full view of Jock, his manservant.

  I can recall almost nothing of the next four and a half months. From London Godfrey wrote stiltedly to say that he had decided to spend some time there, bringing himself up to date on recent archaeological discoveries in Peru. He expected to be very busy, and not to have much time for letter writing. I think I tried at this point to persuade myself that he was telling the truth. But when there was no Christmas letter I came back to reality.

  On January 3, 1959, Jock appeared at the back door as I was straining my mother’s barley-water in the scullery. He had never before been to our house and he did not have to say anything. He gave me a small parcel, containing a letter and diaries, and explained that Godfrey had wished to be buried at sea. Neither of us showed any emotion. I did not encourage him to linger, but I felt that he understood. He, too, was a good friend.

  As I carried the tray into my mother’s room I felt – for the first and so far only time in my life – that I was about to faint. On the wireless Beethoven’s Fifth had just begun. I put the tray by the bed and sat in an armchair out of sight of my mother. Then a curious thing happened. As I listened I could feel strength returning, and not only physical strength. This was one of the strangest experiences of my life: it is virtually impossible to describe. Physically I could feel the music surging through me, recharging me with every sort of energy. By the end I was completely composed and capable of continuing with the day’s routine as though nothing had happened. But this was only a surface composure. Inwardly I had taken the penultimate step towards a complete mental breakdown.

  Again, my memory retains few details about the appalling months that followed. Almost the only thing I can distinctly recollect is picking up a heavy chair and flinging it across my mother’s room in a paroxysm of frustrated rage. Then, one July morning, I resolved to leave home for good. I cannot recall my particular ‘last straw’ incident. I only remember standing outside the back door, beside my loaded bicycle, and saying goodbye to my father. ‘I’m not coming back,’ I told him. He looked at me with despair in his eyes but said nothing.

  Did I then believe my own words? Later it transpired that for a year or so I had been living in a fantasy world, a grim extension of the happy imaginings of childhood. Between September and December 1958 I had forged, to myself, letters from Godfrey at the rate of about two a week – and had shown them to the Pearces. Towards the end of this period, I had also forged letters from Godfrey to Brian and Daphne. And I had reported to them that Jock frequently called at Clairvaux with news of Godfrey – though at that time Jock was also in London and never once visited Ireland. Moreover, I invented friends of Godfrey who arranged secret rendezvous with me in the County Library when it was empty in the evenings. I have no recollection of all this, but long afterwards, when I had regained my balance, Daphne described to me my frantic fantasies. She also admitted that during this period, when she was driving towards Clairvaux to visit me, her predominant emotion was fear lest she might find that at last I had physically attacked my mother.

  At that time I was becoming increasingly obsessed with guilt because I had broken a solemn promise to Godfrey by telling the Pearces ab
out our relationship. This I do most vividly remember. On the secrecy issue, I can now see that Godfrey was alarmingly neurotic and had thoroughly infected me with his own neurosis – as if I hadn’t enough of my own to be getting on with. The basis of his secrecy-neurosis was of course more guilt; he tortured himself with remorse about having destroyed my virtue and risked besmirching my reputation to such an extent that I would have to go through life marked as a dishonoured woman. In retrospect, it is hard to judge which of us was the more unbalanced by this stage. And I do not like to think what might have happened to me without Mark’s sanity in the background.

  Certainly when I left home on that July morning it was very necessary for me to believe, on the surface of my mind, that I was at last escaping. But below the surface I must still have known that no mere physical flight could free me.

  I cycled straight to the Pearces’ farm and spent a week there. (Mark was on holiday at the time.) During this period Daphne and Brian were doing all the giving; I could be of no help to anyone. They gave unstintingly, of understanding and affection, and greedily I took. Although they must have perceived the unreality of my fantasy plans they made no attempt to deprive me of them. Only in after years did I realise how mercilessly I then drained them, emotionally, by relentlessly forcing them to share in my own suffering. And because they loved me they did share in it, willingly.

  My father telephoned – guessing where I had gone – and made a pathetically feeble attempt to persuade me to return home. I pitied him, yet knew that he knew why I could not – and should not – obey this summons. Using all the inner strength I had left, I restrained myself from thinking of my mother. To think of her would have been to pity her. And then I would have returned, dangerously abandoning my healing fantasy world.