Wheels Within Wheels

by Dervla Murphy

  I did not, of course, see the situation so plainly at the time. I only saw the maternal will to dominate reasserting itself. It was decided that Mary must go, as we could no longer afford her wages; and though I knew this to be true I also knew that the time was inopportune for such an economy. We argued, and within hours my mother had had another severe asthmatic attack. The doctor had to be summoned, Mary had to be dismissed and for precisely ten weeks from the day of my father’s funeral I did not once set foot outside the garden gate.

  My mother’s reversion to normality during my father’s illness made it harder to accept mental derangement as a valid excuse for her behaviour. True, she had just suffered the heaviest possible emotional blow. But the effect of her irrational demands was to make me insensitive to her grief and I reproved myself hourly for my cruelty while watching it drive us both into ever deepening misery. Our neighbours added to my guilt by making me feel a hypocrite. They stared at the surface, and admired it, and had no conception of the spiritual betrayal below it. I was there twenty-four hours a day and my mother’s every physical need, real or imagined, was ministered to promptly and efficiently – and with a savage resentment that would have scandalised those good neighbours had they been capable of discerning it. Looking back, I find it odd that I had not learned enough from my 1959 experience to resist this latest takeover by my mother’s will. But this time she had the two new weapons of asthma and bereavement, while I was bereft of my father’s tacit moral support and practical assistance. Also, from him I had inherited a weak soft-heartedness that was closer to moral cowardice than to true kindness because it fostered my mother’s neuroses.

  My long imprisonment, during those ten weeks of spring, completely broke my spirit. I ceased to fight, inwardly, and lived from day to day in a cocoon of resignation. I ate almost nothing, smoked far too many cigarettes and drank far too much whiskey. Yet I never got drunk; I was at the more dangerous stage of keeping my alcohol level up twenty-four hours a day. Finally Mark took action, when he was unable to endure any longer the change taking place within me. I can remember no details, but a responsible daily woman was installed, my mother was somehow persuaded of the urgent necessity of releasing me and on May 7 – that date I have never forgotten – I cycled down the road, feeling incredulous, with three hours of freedom ahead of me. This was to be the routine: Saturdays and Sundays excepted, I would be free from two to five every afternoon.

  It needed only this break in the automaton rhythm of the past months to release a cataract of despair. I was nearly thirty and had achieved – it then seemed – nothing. As a daughter I was a failure, as a woman I was ageing, as a writer I was atrophied, as a traveller I had only glimpsed possibilities. But at least I was again reacting and feeling, even if all my feelings were painful.

  In the middle of June, when we were granted probate, the financial facts of our new life had to be faced. For the past decade, one of my mother’s most trying phobias had been an economy mania. Gradually she had developed an obsessional fear of real poverty, should my father predecease her – and now her nightmare had come true. What were we to live on? We had our home, and a weekly income from investments of exactly £4 2s. – and nothing else. Should we sell Clairvaux and buy a small cottage or rent a couple of rooms? Or let Clairvaux while living elsewhere? Or take in lodgers? Or convert Clairvaux into two flats and let one of them? There could be no question of my earning anything as I was almost unnaturally devoid of accomplishments – unable to drive, type, sew, cook, garden, keep accounts or even amuse children. Yet I could not take our parlous economic state seriously; my Micawber streak is too strong. I have never been able to worry about money, partly because I need so little of it to keep me happy and partly because of an unshakeable conviction that ‘Something Will Turn Up’. (Something always does.)

  I at first thought it healthy for us to have this immediate, concrete problem to deflect us from our psychotic personality battle; but soon the problem had become part of the battle. I was totally opposed to selling Clairvaux; in an odd way I had always thought of it as particularly mine. And, despite what we had each endured within the house, I loved it – less for itself than for its surroundings. My mother, however, had worked out, most logically, that it made no sense for people with such a tiny income to have so much capital tied up in their home. She therefore decided, towards the end of June, to sell Clairvaux and move to a Dublin flat – or, more likely, bed-sitter.

  I resisted this plan strenuously, and not only for the sake of the house. I knew that I could not possibly cope if uprooted from Lismore and deprived of my friends’ support. But I lost the first round and early in July we moved to Dublin, leaving Clairvaux on an estate agent’s books.

  Our poverty notwithstanding, my mother was too proud to put any relative to the inconvenience of entertaining an invalid. She settled into a nursing home, moderating her nocturnal demands to avoid having to engage a private night nurse. I stayed nearby with an aunt and did duty from 7.00 am until 11.00 pm. At intervals I was despatched to inspect flats – a task which I mitched, having made up my mind that under no circumstances would I agree to settle in Dublin.

  Our unfortunate relatives, suddenly drawn into the Murphy inferno, were altogether at a loss. They gave us much well-meant, conflicting and usually irrelevant advice, which we ignored. Only in opposing my decision to take a holiday abroad were they unanimous, seeing this as no way to treat a recently bereaved invalid mother. But I was impervious to their criticisms. I knew that I must now assert myself, once and for all, as an adult whose reasonable demands had to be met if my mother and I were to have any future together. Our relatives, however, being unaware of these undercurrents, could not be blamed for condemning my plans as pure selfishness. (My mother and I habitually closed ranks in the presence of outsiders and never allowed them to see just how strained was our relationship.)

  Now it was my turn to blackmail. In mid-July I told my mother that I had resigned myself to the sale of Clairvaux but would never agree to leaving the Blackwater Valley. If she would return to Lismore, we could go home after my holiday and set about searching for a suitable cottage. Otherwise, I would remain abroad. Without a moment’s hesitation, my mother called my bluff by refusing even to consider a return to Lismore. A few hours later, my bicycle Roz and I took the night boat from Dun Laoghaire.

  This time I was not being swept away from Ireland on a wave of demented fantasy; I intended to return as soon as my mother could adjust herself to the realities of our situation. Yet this flight from duty distressed me even more than my 1959 escape. My actions were not out of control, as they had been two years previously, and I knew that my ostensibly final departure was a calculated measure designed to break the will of someone who had already had to suffer far more than her share. Therefore during the internal dialogues that took place between the two halves of myself I found it necessary to emphasise how relentlessly my mother had followed a course that must drive me away – almost, indeed, as though a part of her wished to do so, thus unloading from her conscience the burden of being my millstone.

  I landed at Calais with £10 in my money-belt – enough to take me to the Hilckmanns, in Mainz. There I could be sure of a warm welcome; they had stayed with us for six weeks during the previous summer while Anton was being taught Irish – his twenty-second language – by my father. I slept out in my flea-bag each night – the weather was almost too hot for long-distance cycling – and had unwound considerably by the time I reached Mainz. There I relaxed for a week before getting work as a farm-hand in the village of Ober Saulheim, some fourteen miles further down the Rhine. I spent the next six weeks hoeing vines, scouring churns, harvesting straw, mucking out cow byres, grading eggs and corking wine. My working hours were not much shorter than at home – 5.0 am to 11.0 pm with a half-day on Sundays – but I welcomed being (by Irish standards) slave-driven. It was exactly what I needed at that time. Ceaseless labour, with only four half-hour breaks for vast meals – two of them picnic-
style, eaten on the job-site – left me without the energy to fret. At the centre of me a hard little knot of guilty misery remained untied and I dared not think about the future. But meanwhile constant exertion in the open air, good food, few cigarettes and unbroken nights of deep sleep were rapidly restoring my health.

  Even as late as 1961, in technological Germany, one could, as a farm-labourer, feel closely in touch with the past – with the many generations of villagers who had lived in those same houses, cultivating those same hectares. The almost universal farm village is unknown in Ireland and I enjoyed the novelty of sharing in Ober Saulheim’s rhythmical community life. Early each morning lines of oxcarts creaked off to the cornfields in a cloud of yellowish dust, and files of vineyard workers made for the sunny slopes above the river with hoes over their shoulders, and groups of hausfraus gathered by the communal deep-freeze in the village centre to take out great hunks of meat and containers of fruit and vegetables. At that season Ober Saulheim smelt pleasantly of fresh cow-dung and sweet hay and new milk and fermenting wine, with only an occasional discordant whiff of diesel oil from a passing tractor. The nearest autobahn was only a kilometre away, but as far as the villagers were concerned it might have been on another planet.

  Although my employer’s vineyard was well known, and his son and heir was a forward-looking twenty-one-year-old, the Landgraf family – like their neighbours – used few labour-saving devices. They had all the basic bits of agricultural machinery, and a simple hand-machine for milking their ten cows, but the house, outbuildings and cellars – and most of their work methods – remained exactly as they had always been. This disdain for gadgetry and the symbols of affluence greatly appealed to me, as did the whole village atmosphere. There must have been jealousies, squabbles and gossip, as in every such community, but the general feeling was of uncomplicated serenity.

  Yet that holiday confirmed what I had suspected on my first visit to Germany: that the Germans and the Irish have remarkably little in common. The Landgrafs could not have been kinder to me and I became especially fond of Frau Landgraf, who treated me like an adopted daughter. But whether in the farming world of Ober Saulheim or in the academic world of Mainz – where I spent most Sunday afternoons with the Hilckmanns – I found it impossible to establish that rapport which had come about so effortlessly in Spain. No doubt the Germans are as well able to enjoy themselves as anyone else; it was probably mere chance that in both those circles nobody seemed to have the slightest interest in anything but unsmiling hard work.

  At least twice a week relatives wrote to report on my mother’s state. Physically she was no worse than usual and was being well cared for by the nursing-home staff – though she herself did not think so. Mentally, however, she was suffering intensely as a result of my desertion. Then, in mid-September, came a letter saying that she was longing to return to Lismore and enclosing a Frankfurt-Dublin air-ticket. On compassionate grounds, a dismantled Roz was allowed to travel with me as baggage.

  I could detect no reproach in my mother’s manner when we were reunited. And I wondered then, as I had for the same reason in 1959, if, with the residue of her ‘real’ self, she understood all and so could forgive all.

  On our first evening at home in Lismore my mother suddenly said, ‘I want you to take Clairvaux off the books tomorrow. All my worrying about money is silly – not necessary. You’ll have your freedom quite soon.’ She had spoken very matter-of-factly and I thought she was probably right; with my father she had wanted to live, without him she wanted to die. But her tone had been accusing – and there is a unique horror about being accused of wishing someone to die when the accusation is true. Momentarily I was tempted to make some insincere, dutiful remark; but I chose silence. Any false protest could only degrade our relationship still further. As it was, that brief exchange of words, glances and silences had had a paradoxically companionable undercurrent.

  During the following days, I noticed how much my mother had changed in my absence. My struggle to break her grip on me had been only too successful. Not merely had she lost the will to dominate me, she seemed also to have lost the will to live. If I wished to lacerate myself I could argue, plausibly, that I killed her by deserting her that August. But if this is so, I did it under the guidance of my own instinct of self-preservation. Jungle law operated. One of us had to be sacrificed and the fittest survived.

  The eleven months that followed were the saddest of my life. At times I even looked back nostalgically to the era of my mother’s domination; that, at least, had been an expression of her personality – however distorted. Now her dulled mind and passivity and compliance were my punishment for having so implacably opposed her in the past. She still listened to music, but she did not read, or listen to discussions on the wireless, or wish to hear what was in the Irish Times, or proffer any opinion about the running of the household. Only when visitors called did some ember of pride flicker into flame and she would receive them with a poignantly recognisable shadow of her old graciousness and cheerfulness. I was no longer in her consciously exercised power, yet never before had she had such power to move me.

  By the beginning of August 1962 it was clear that soon my mother would die; she who had never accepted painkillers or tranquillisers was now permanently under heavy sedation. I moved about the house in a daze. Sorrow contributed nothing to it – or nothing that I could perceive. Relief predominated, but there was also a primitive reaction of horror – altogether absent during my father’s last illness – to the physical dissolution of the body that for so long I had tended. In thirty years of invalidism my mother had never once developed a bedsore, but now her body began to decompose while she still lived. I could cope no longer and the Jubilee Nurse came twice a day.

  On the evening of August 24 Daphne came to sit with me through the night and at twenty-five past one in the morning my mother died – as peacefully, in the end, as had my father. She had survived him by exactly eighteen months.

  As my mother drew her last breath, peace enfolded me. It was profound and healing, untinged by grief, or remorse, or guilt, or loneliness. I thought of it as a gift from my mother’s spirit – and then mocked my fancy, without quite discrediting it. For long I had suffered with her, and made her suffer, and been made to suffer by her; and of late I had mourned for her. Now I could only rejoice – and in Daphne’s company I did not have to disguise my joy. A great burden was gone, the double burden of another’s tragedy and my own inadequacy. I stood at the threshold of an independent life and I felt, that night, my parents’ blessing on it.

  After a moment I left the room – my mother had not yet assumed the aspect of the dead – and in defiance of local custom I never looked on her face again. Twelve years passed before a letter from a friend, on the subject of her own mother’s death, allowed me to see why I had so obstinately stayed in the sitting-room when I should have been pretending to pray with the neighbours beside my mother’s corpse. I knew, without permitting the knowledge to register on my conscious mind, what the undertaker would have to do to accommodate a malformed body in a conventional coffin. And I could not bring myself to look upon that body in a normal lying posture.

  It is difficult to convey my feelings when I woke next morning and realised that I was responsible to and for no one but myself – that I was free to do what I liked, when I liked, as I liked. For more than sixteen years every day had been lived in the shadow of my mother’s need. Even on holidays, my movements had had to be exactly regulated so that I would unfailingly arrive home on a certain date. I remember sitting in hot sunshine in the back garden with Daphne – surrounded by that untrammelled growth of nettles and thistles which proved me to be my father’s daughter – and feeling currents of an appreciation of liberty running through my body like mild electric shocks. I was exalted by the realisation of freedom. When callers came to offer sympathy, Daphne received them and gave the necessary convention-soothing impression that I was too distrait to appear.

  Afterwards,
I discovered that some of my friends had dreaded my reaction to my mother’s death; when at last the almost intolerable pressure was removed, anything, they felt, might happen. They had overlooked the fact that for months the pressure had been gradually easing, giving me an opportunity to readjust.

  Again I stood between Daphne and Brian at the graveside, as my mother’s coffin was lowered to lie beside my father’s. Then I returned with them to Monatrim and next morning visited Clairvaux for a few hours and was alone for the first time in my own home. Unexpectedly I found myself revelling in the novel sensation of ownership; possession of a house and all it contained seemed to symbolise Freedom and Independence. It never occurred to me that I had no means of maintaining the place: possession was all. At the age of thirty I had not yet possessed anything but the minimum of clothes, the maximum of books and a bicycle.

  I wandered happily from room to room. The ghosts were friendly; the misunderstandings and antagonisms and furies and resentments of the past had left no stain. I decided to convert my mother’s bedroom into my study, a simple change that needed only the replacing of her bed by the dining-room table. All the other furnishings of the room were left unchanged – it had been designed as a sitting room rather than a bedroom – and unchanged they remain to this day. I write on the spot where she died.

  Love leaves calm. Even when circumstances have given it the semblance of hate, this is so. In the tangled relationships between my parents and myself love was often abused, denied, misdirected, thwarted, exploited and outwardly debased. But it existed, and it left calm.

  17

  Two days after my mother’s funeral I left Lismore to visit my Co Wicklow friends. By then I realised that despite my basic calm I was, inevitably, suffering from shock. A total lack of physical energy betrayed this condition. Feeling too exhausted to cycle the 130 miles to Wicklow, I hitch-hiked.