The Reckoning

by Chonghaile, Clár Ní;

  I am not sure how my stay here ends. Part of me wants to slit my wrists and run wild through this tasteful cottage, spurting blood all over the cream sofas, rattan rugs and pale green walls like a balloon pirouetting wildly as the air screams out. I have a visceral, rage-filled desire to obliterate l’ambiance rustique so painstakingly created by the house-proud owner of this cottage. But that seems a bit overblown, even for me.

  I’m going to pretend you’re sitting here beside me. It’s a tough assignment even for someone as well versed in the imaginary as me. Ten books under my belt but summoning up your image is almost too much for my powers of imagination. The last picture I saw was from Millie’s wedding two years ago. It was a photograph in your local paper, the Ham and High. I’ll tell you one of my secrets, Diane, but this is just a naughty peccadillo compared to others I will reveal later. Sometimes, I take the train into London and stop in West Hampstead. I wander slowly up to your neck of the woods, puffing my way past the gaudy money transfer outlets and stifling corner shops, up the hill until I get to the rarefied air of Hampstead. I always wonder if I will see you. To be honest, I’m not sure what I would do if I did. Duck into a doorway, probably.

  The newspaper photograph was a little blurry but you looked good for almost 50. You wear your years lightly, as I have been told I do though past 70 there is a certain degree of inevitable decay no matter what you do. I’m going to assume nothing much has changed since then. I remember my early 50s, cruising along the flat of life, beyond the peaks and valleys of youth and not yet dodging the precipices of old age. Yours is a tranquil landscape.

  You’ve not given in to grey hair and I am glad about that. When we met that one time, back in the 60s, I felt an irrational delight to see you had my fine, blonde hair. You wear glasses – you must’ve inherited your weak eyes from your father’s side. Robert’s parents both needed glasses though he said his mother was too vain to wear them. I’m sure he needed them too in his last year but by then, I don’t think he wanted to see the world too clearly any more. I have my own pair now but I don’t always wear them either. One doesn’t always need to see everything.

  I was delighted to see that photo – payback for years of anonymous snooping – but the image was disappointingly static and formal. A wedding pose. Your eyes are squinting, your smile is tight and fake as though you are fed up now with this mother-of-the-bride stuff. Even as a baby, you had a no-bullshit glare. It used to frighten me a little – I was thinner-skinned then – but the woman I am now rejoices in its memory. The photo, however, gives me no sense of fluidity. I cannot imagine your face in motion. What would you look like if you were here, staring at me through the shadow-shimmering rays of the dying sun? Would you have hate in your eyes and what would that even look like on you now? Do you hate me, Diane? I am genuinely curious. I have always been so quick to hate, so quick to condemn, so quick to deny love, at least since that awful September day 50 years ago. Are you like me? Or did you manage to preserve the optimism I felt back when I still believed that life could be perfect, that all things being equal life would, in fact, be perfect? Did the scales fall off your eyes too? Or is the final, fabulous irony the fact that I, Lina Rose, the acclaimed writer who ‘wields her pen like a scalpel as she probes false prophets of naïve idealism and unfounded optimism’, have a daughter who still believes in a benign universe despite everything?

  When I said earlier that I was wondering if I had killed a man, or men, you probably thought I was being facetious. I was not. How can we possibly estimate our individual responsibility for any event that involves us? We would need the omniscience of a deity to know how our actions are seen by those they affect. Then we would need the calculus skills of a Leibniz to make sense of the infinite sequences and series that bring us to our defined limits. And then, on top of all that, we would need a Caroll-ian imagination. It’s a tall order for any human, even the most rational and clear-sighted. I am neither of those things.

  I was, of course, referring to your father. Primarily. I will tell you of the other man too but later. For now, the question is did I kill your father? Having dodged the bullets bending around these hedges, having survived the road to Paris and the push into Belgium and all the rest, did my big-eyed incompetence as a wife and my inexcusable inability to hear him bring about his end? Or was it ‘just’ the war? But that seems too pat. The war killed millions in its time and afterwards when overloaded brains exploded behind drawn curtains in poky bedrooms or on lonely moors where curlews carved the skies with their spiralling cries. Your father was among these casualties of war but that is not the whole story. And what a daft concept the whole story is anyway. As if our messy lives could be stitched together with a single thread.

  The sun has gone now and it is getting chilly. Northern Europe will disappoint like that. This continent has no consistency. I am going inside to sit on one of those pristine cream sofas, under the faintly sinister eyes of the fake Degas ballerinas, bowing and arabesque-ing across the walls. I know that’s not a word but I am a writer and a rebel and I will make up my own words if I damn well please. I might very well have to soon.

  I have a story to tell you, Diane. It is my story and your story and the story of a century that remade the world like a supermassive black hole. When we reach the end, you will be the ultimate arbiter of whether it was worth your time. You will also sit in judgment on me and on the memories I reveal. I do not expect absolution but I must conclude that I yearn for forgiveness.

  I will walk up to the main street to post this tomorrow morning. Finding your address was too easy for an ex-journalist like me. It begs the question: did you always want to be found? The next chapter will follow in a few days. I shall imagine myself as Dickens and you as my reader, agog for the next instalment of this fascinating serial. Modesty has never been my strongest quality and besides, I need to feel the heavy hand of time on my shoulder because it is there and it is not moving.

  CHAPTER 2

  You already know the bare bones of who I am despite… what shall I call it? Our estrangement? That will do although you are right: it does not lay enough of the blame at my door but I can think of nothing better. You might choose other words but since I am telling this tale, I get to choose. You would narrate another story and both versions would be true. That is the beauty and tragedy of the human condition.

  When I started as a journalist, I thought there was a definitive truth that could be unearthed by thoroughly re-searching a topic and tirelessly interviewing witnesses. But over the years, I have realised that no two people see the same event in the same way. What we believe shapes what we see as though there is a secret passageway from the frontal lobe with its reasoning capacities to the occipital lobe, which governs sight. Just as dogs only see blue, grey and yellow, it appears our vision is more limited than we would like to believe: we only see what we want to see or what we can bear to see. With any two versions of an event, neither is totally wrong and neither is necessarily right. What we know of life is a synthesis of multiple viewpoints.

  The basic ‘facts’ of my life are public property, laid out in black and white on the dust jackets of my books. No mention of you, of course. I forfeited my right to claim you when I decided in 1947 to reinvent myself as a single woman. A woman without a past who no longer believed in the future but who could not bring herself to say the ultimate goodbye. That woman eventually wrote my novels, taking a naughty delight in wrong-footing readers. I am known for my plot twists and that tendency to obfuscate extends even to the short biography I have allowed my publishers to print: Lina Rose was born in St Albans in 1920. After her husband died in 1947, she worked as a journalist for two decades before turning to fiction. Her first book, Under the Canopy, was published in 1976 and was translated into 15 languages. She has since written 10 novels. She lives in St Albans with her golden retriever, Sam.

  I don’t have a golden retriever or any kind of dog. It just seemed like the natural end to that sentence. I could hardly write: S
he lives in St Albans with her regrets and her rage, wondering if the daughter she gave up will ever forgive her and whether her husband killed himself because she didn’t know how to hear his screams.

  Although, I suppose that might have lifted sales.

  I know I shouldn’t lie about my life. It is not only mine to lie about. Apart from betraying you, I am giving a bum steer to anyone who studies my work. That might sound arrogant. It is not. I am unapologetically clear-sighted when it comes to my professional achievements. Whatever you may think of me as your mother, you cannot deny my talent. I am proud of the essays, reportage and fiction I have produced and I am comfortable with the accolades bestowed on me. False modesty offends me enormously. It is another example of the destructive myopia that sees most of us drift through our lives without ever appreciating the import of our actions and inaction. I have no patience with that, not least because that is how I lived until your father died. No, let me be precise, at least here: until he killed himself.

  Sometimes even I get caught up in my own fabrications. It has been a long time since I described Robert’s death as a suicide. Those who knew us then are all dead and I’ve never felt anybody else needed to know the details. In truth, few care to ask. The isolating bubble of grief is remarkably indestructible. Even after many years have passed, few people will ask a widow to explain how her husband died. It must be an atavistic fear of contagion. I too was reluctant to speak the truth out loud. I told myself I was hiding his shame but I wonder if it was just mine.

  My work has already been dissected many times and Lina Rose, the woman, is always brought into it. Of course, all fiction springs from the author’s own experience – a moment, a glance, a random thought, the mystery of the counterfactual – but that does not mean it is true to that person’s life. At best, the author’s life adds authenticity but the work is by no means a mirror. It must not be, for if it were, the truth would never appear. It stuns me how few people understand this. They say they do but really, they are always looking for you inside the pages of your book.

  Let’s imagine it now: an earnest 20-year-old, a girl probably, sits in one of those dreadful circles that they favour in college tutorials. Maybe she’s squeezed awkwardly into one of those old-fashioned wraparound single desks. Let’s call her Brenda. It’s her turn to speak. Maybe she’s chosen to look at Under the Canopy. Let’s say she has. I imagine she will call me Lina because she thinks she knows me. She’s asked a question. She shifts in her uncomfortable seat, trying unsuccessfully to seem authoritative despite her absurd posture, and says:

  “I read this as a novel of redemption. Gary’s admission of his complicity in the Bình Hòa massacre, even though he was not physically present, Bao’s realisation that his avowed neutrality was another form of cowardice and Sheila’s acknowledgement that the horror of war gave her the emotional kick she needed to deal with a world that denied her very nature. I think these themes must have resonated for Lina when she wrote it in the mid-70s because she had returned to St Albans and was living a quiet life of reflection – a redemption of a sort, I suppose – after decades of being on the frontlines of some of the most horrendous global events.”

  Brenda will think those things because that is what I said in the few interviews I gave before I retreated even further from the world. I said I came back to St Albans in 1973 to be near my husband’s grave and to dedicate myself to writing as a way of exorcising the demons that had come to haunt me as I bore witness to the dark side of the post-war era.

  It’s all lies, or if you prefer, fiction inspired by real events. I started Under the Canopy on Stijn’s veranda in the late 60s as I watched cloud-shadows ripple across Kenya’s Rift Valley. I was not seeking any kind of redemption. I was in love with Kenya, with Stijn, and with my life. I was full of sizzling energy, like the static-filled highland air before the afternoon rains. The end of that era sent me into a spiral, and yes, here’s the kernel of truth: I ended up back in England and the book was finished during a period of reflection and mourning and to stop me from losing my mind. Under the Canopy was written in delight and published in a kind of despair. A literary cry for help. I had lost everyone and I could no longer live alone with my ghosts. I sought solace and hope among strangers – my new readers – and I did not want them to know too much about the woman, Lina Rose. I wanted to be someone they could love. I had disappointed too often before.

  In any case, Under the Canopy is what it is regardless of what Brenda says. She will take from it what she needs. Just as you will take from these words what you need and what you can bear. I have no control after the keys have been struck and the last full stop placed. That is the beauty of this métier. Everything is always a work in progress; the story is perpetually in motion, a lump of dough refashioned by every reader’s hands.

  To her credit, Brenda has a point. I did fall into a kind of reverie when I returned from Kenya to St Albans in 1973. I had failed in my attempts to break free from my past. My career as a journalist was over and I was not yet a published author. Home again in the land of my youth, my ghosts came calling and death was on my mind constantly. Has the panic caught up with you yet, Diane? Can you hear the sibilance of the sand’s remorseless slide through the timer? Do you know definitively that you will never read all the books you’ve bought, never use that pretty letter-writing set you picked up in a village market five years ago, never dance in public again? Never, never, never.

  For me, the fear came calling in my mid-50s. Of course, there were particular circumstances but even without what happened to Stijn, I think I would have succumbed to its torments. Fifty is a monumental number. It refuses obfuscation. It will not be massaged into something more palatable. The new 30 or the new 40? Heavens, no. It is irreducibly itself. I was able to ignore it while I was in Kenya but when I found myself back in England, there could be no denying its significance. And so the fear found me.

  At first, it made me wake gasping for breath in the middle of the night. Or I would lose my bearings at odd moments during the day when I couldn’t see the point of whatever I was doing. I laugh now to think how weak I was, especially from this vantage point where the oblivion that terrified me then is so much closer. Eventually I pulled myself together – we always do, we children of the wars. I realised the fear was unravelling my moorings and so I decided to walk myself back to some kind of sanity, to stride out and say, “Watch me be. Watch me walk, you darkling ghoul.” I trekked for miles, tunnelling back to my past and my parents’ past through rutted lanes overhung with honeysuckle and echoing with the strangled yelping of startled pheasants.

  I discovered I could drown out death’s insistent whining with my memories. As we age, the past becomes so much more engaging than the future and so I started revisiting all the places that once made up my world: Folly Lane, Hatfield Road, the Bernards Heath park, my schools and the war memorial on St Peter’s Street. Retracing these paths calmed me, restored my balance so that I could face the fear.

  Something else has also helped me these past years but I have not yet decided whether to tell you that part of my story. I’m not sure I can bear your judgment on this particular betrayal. I beg your patience, Diane. I don’t mean to be a tease, not really. This letter is my personal twelve-step programme to unearth the truth or, at the very least, to set down as honest an account of what happened as I can. We have a long way to go.

  As I walked myself out of my shrinking, unreliable future and into my rich and solid past, I began to dream up snippets of stories, barely-there plot ideas, curious nuggets of name and nature. The rest, as they say, is history. Now, with all these books to my name, I find that the only story left for me to tell is mine, and yours.

  Let me explain why I think you should read on. We did not have the luxury of time that would have allowed me to slowly unveil your family history so that your sense of self expanded organically as you grew. Other mothers might have said: “What a beautiful drawing, darling. Your grandmother loved painting. T
hat picture of the canal in the hallway is hers. Her name was Lily too.” Or it might be the grandparents themselves who stitched a child into the family fabric. “Ooh, you’re a right mucky pup. I remember your uncle when he was your age. Just the same. Into everything.”

  That was not to be for us. Among the many things I denied you was any real sense of where you came from. That was some theft, my dear Diane, and I apologise. I did not think of it then but now that the past has become so important to me, I see my crime more completely. I suppose I must have shared some family history with you during your first year. But you will not remember those night-time whispers and daytime pre-language chats and once you were gone, you had to be truly gone.

  Society abhors mothers who give up their children. It is an unconscionable act and so the punishment must be unthinkable: permanent exile. I do not dispute my punishment but I find now that I yearn for a kind of understanding from you. I want to tell you why. It is presumptuous beyond belief but that is the truth. You deserve to know our story because it is also yours. I want to give you back your history. This is the debt I owe you and only I can pay it.

  When I gave you up, Diane, I did so because I was scared I could not care for you, that I could not love you or love anyone. I could barely care for myself after everything that had happened. I could blame the war, of course, but that is not excuse enough. So many people lost so much but they found the strength to count their blessings. I couldn’t. In a kind of defiant madness, I threw your love onto the pyre as well. I was paralysed by despair and loneliness but I was also hungrier than ever for life. We used to speak of war aphrodisia. I had a kind of grief aphrodisia. My anguish co-existed with a frenzied desire to escape. When I gave you up, I was irrational, incoherent and utterly exhausted. They have words for this today – post-traumatic stress disorder. But what of it? We were all PTSD sufferers in the late 1940s. During the war, we did what we were told. We got on with things. Made the most of it. Snapped out and buttoned up and moved on. But there was a price to pay.