Mother

by Nicholas Royle

  I love my father’s capitalisation of ‘small pond’. Elsewhere in Widworthiana he speaks of the Black Pond and the Green Pond as well. But most of all I love his discreet ‘we’: ‘we frequently see them swooping around with their usual grace and speed’. Alongside the evocation of climate change what most strikes me in these paragraphs is how they reveal my father to be more like my mother than I’d come to assume. That Royle ‘we’ is at once poignant and disorientating. Like the tracery of the house martins.

  In earlier instalments my father recounts the sad fate of Charles and Brownie: they are taken off by the fox. He does not demur at describing the specific nature of their decapitations and gruesome remains left in the Spinney (his name for the steep slope of pine trees at the farthest edge of the garden) and in the hedgerow forty yards down the lane. For the surviving Griselda my parents in due course found a local farm happy to take her. As my father reports in Instalment IX (June 1989):

  Griselda is now fully settled into her new home and appears to have taken over leadership of the small flock of other geese there. She has laid quite a few eggs, so we have great hopes that she will achieve motherhood at last. Kathleen calls at her new abode at least once a week – partly to buy things from the farm shop and partly to give Griselda a few crusts of bread that she has saved for her – so we’ll always be able to keep up-to-date on her progress.

  That tender ‘we’ once again!

  But the only human death in Widworthiana is recorded in Instalment XVI (2/3 July 1990):

  I regret to have to tell you that Kitty West died last week, but as she was aged 86 I suppose it is a thing that one has to accept. Certainly this will eliminate the likelihood of our acquiring any more white doves – though curiously enough a couple of weeks ago (the first sighting of such things for many months) I heard a great fluttering of wings one morning and on looking out of the kitchen window I saw that three white doves had landed on the roof of the garage…

  For me this is the breaking point in my father’s entire document. It has to do with what is concealed behind the formality of his ‘I regret to have to tell you’ – as if his readers in the United States or elsewhere might be expected to have some personal attachment to Kitty based on the knowledge of her that has accrued in the pages of Widworthiana – and the stoicism around Kitty’s death as ‘a thing that one has to accept’ (though even this is hedged as a supposition rather than a conviction).

  My father began writing his Widworthiana soon after we learned that my brother had only a matter of months to live. The family was falling to pieces. I’d applied to attend a six-week summer course at the School of Criticism and Theory in New Hampshire. In the spring of 1985 I heard I’d won a fellowship. All travel and accommodation expenses paid. In jubilation I called my mother. She said without a moment’s hesitation: You can’t go. I felt acute disappointment but I knew she was right. Instead I moved back home from Oxford to spend as much time as I could with my brother and Cris. Among other things that summer our mother gave us money to hire the Peugeot Estate which he and I (with Cris and my girlfriend at that time) drove up and all around the very north of Scotland. As far as Farr. The final holiday. And meanwhile in wordless grief my father repaired to his book-lined study and began to write.

  In all the pages of Widworthiana no reference is ever made to the fact that his son is dying or has died. My father talks in detail about his first grandson Samuel (born six months before my brother’s death and a month after Simon and Cristina married) and the games they play together and the toy cars acquired or constructed for these games. He talks also about Cris. But of Sam’s father there is not a word.

  Instalment XII (dated with an antiquary’s precision ‘11th Oct. et seq. 1989’) includes a reference to the black rabbit:

  When I was returning from Sutton on 3rd October I saw the black rabbit again, this time in the lane near our entrance drive. It ran back down the drive ahead of me and as I advanced very slowly and carefully it had disappeared into some other part of the garden by the time I eventually parked the car outside the front door, but at least we now know that it’s still around somewhere.

  I imagine my father after an exhausting day at the office in Surrey. Driving the long dark autumnal journey back. My mother alone in the house. Waiting for the headlights of his car to hit the hedge at the top of the driveway. After coming in and kissing her on the cheek (as she always let him do but without ever returning the kiss) he might have remarked: I just spotted the black rabbit again. But if he did so it would have been without any further elaboration. Only in his writing – and even here it goes unremarked – he gives the date. My father was a lifelong scrutineer of dates and times. 3 October 1989 was the third anniversary of my brother’s funeral. My father was not religious in any conventional sense: he had great loyalty to his own eccentric kind of Buddhism (without any Buddha). He was very interested in numerology and superstitious thinking. But he had no special apprehension about what happens after death. Or at any rate none that he ever talked about to me. But the sighting of the black rabbit (‘Blackie’ as he calls it elsewhere in Widworthiana) seemed to pulse with possible meaning: ‘at least we now know that it’s still around somewhere’.

  My father was an enigma to the last. I visited him about a fortnight before he died and we found ourselves going upstairs to bed at the same time. At the foot of the stairs on the window-ledge (a deep ledge characteristic of old Devon cottages) stood a rather old and battered-looking brown and black painted clay owl that my brother had made when he was a teenager. I never paid much attention to this object but that night it became clear to me that my father held it in particular regard. Every night before going up to bed (he now revealed to me) he patted the owl on the head as if it were his son and murmured: Good night, mate!

  Speechful

  If maxwellian was synonymous with ‘reserved’ or ‘unspeaking’ – in a world of one’s own – no word seemed apt to capture the speechful aura around my mother. To enter into a conversation with her was never a decision. It was already happening. You were bobbing on a tide or washed by a wave whose crest had preceded you. Talk was a flood. Awash. But there was never a sense of anything gratuitous or pointless. Wonder and danger were never remote. In part this was because of the unconscious power of her speech. As my cousin Mike recalls: ‘She’d say something that would silence a room but never rebound on her.’ This unrebounding seemed innocent. Any politician would give their eye teeth for such a gift. It was the genius of a speech belonging to no one and everyone. But you would never think to respond to her with the claim: You don’t know what you’re saying. Her words were charged with might. Meaningful but wild. Without pettiness or spite. Still any interlocutor had to proceed with care. An old friend from my schooldays remembers her as ‘a strong-minded lady’. He recalls: ‘I needed to tread carefully, I felt, or I would merit her scorn (albeit never articulated), so very different from the mothers of every other friend I ever had.’ And then there was wonder and danger also in what Shakespeare might have called the frame of her discourse. You never knew what she was going to say next. You never knew where a conversation might be heading. You couldn’t tell what kind of conversation it even was or could be. You could never feel quite sure about how she’d got from one topic to the next. It went so fast. It all went with such ease – even amidst the pauses – that you were often left puzzling over not just how it had ended but also how it began.

  Family conversation had always revolved around my mother. But with her disintegration it became untenable. More hopeless than with a lover with whom one has just broken up. No one wishes to remember sentences that end – bobbing about.

  Unfinished.

  Tumbleweed connections.

  To witness my mother in talk’s abyss. In the black hole of a full stop you could never see

  The life of her speech knocked out. And this crushed banana childlike space of speech was the smashing of the frame of mourning. When were we to acknowledge that she was
no longer with us? What words what order of words could make sense?

  Conversation conservation life supportive paradise lost.

  Before she was ill my mother loved to talk to anyone. And she was an inveterate listener. She loved to hear what someone had to say. She had a dislike for social privilege and snobbery of any sort. And for the kinds of behaviour that accompanied it. Like her husband she was sickened by fox-hunting. Living in the suburbs of London this didn’t much matter. But it was different in the depths of Devon. The hunt came up and down the lane. (This was in the early 1980s – years before the arrival and departure of our geese.) On several occasions the fox had scarpered across the garden with the hounds and a horse or two in pursuit. At last even my father felt prevailed upon to speak. He attempted to reason one morning with the woman who lived down the lane and who helped organise the hunt. He had no success but conveyed the family’s sentiments well enough. Thereafter he acquired a little rubber stamp and used it to darken every envelope he posted. For fox sake ban the hunt. This was more or less the most outspoken thing my father ever said. Or wrote. Or at least rubber-stamped. He never swore. The most extreme expletive to which he ever resorted was a very occasional ‘Blast!’

  But my brother – a short while afterwards – got into an intense altercation with the fox-hunting lady down the lane. He spoke his passionate animal-loving mind to her. She returned fire. He was upset by the encounter. I wasn’t there and nor was my mother. But a couple of days later she and I were driving up the lane and saw the slick dark form of the neighbour on horseback beside her stable. My mother asked me to stop the car – and then she rolled down her window. You silly cunt! she cried. So foreign to her idiom and thus all the more shocking.

  The hunt never crossed on to our property again.

  My mother otherwise liked to talk with any and everyone. That is what it was to be Nurse Conversation. A nurse of and in and for conversation. Nurse Hood. After we moved from Fulham to Cheam in the early sixties she became staff nurse at a local BP factory. And after moving to the West Country she worked part-time in a nearby nursing home. She nursed all the sanity of her days. Wherever she went she listened and she talked with a sympathy that seems only more remarkable as time passes. She once said to me: Never lose the common touch. Like much from her lips impossible to judge. Did she say it because she thought I was already losing it? And with common touch I knew at the time what she meant. But like other phrases that I recall with piercing accuracy I am left looking at them as I might graffiti. Never lose the common touch. It remains a yardstick. It watches over me every moment. Do I have it? Could I ever know if I had it?

  She had it in any case. And her conversation was as prolific as a jungle. To rich or poor junior or senior known or unknown she’d talk and listen as if there was no tomorrow. When I was a teenager my friends would come over after school and she would engage them in conversation in the kitchen on arrival. I would chip in but after a while found myself saying I was going up to my room. Come and join me whenever. And sometimes my friends got past conversing with my mother and sometimes they didn’t. For the most part I felt unbothered by this. But I felt rather miffed when one or two of them developed such a rapport with her that they’d turn up and not mind in the least if I wasn’t at home. Conversation with her had a therapeutic power. Troubled teenagers felt better. The lives of their parents and others were enlivened. She raised the tone and spirit. A physician to all men and women young or old. I could never talk like that but what a mother to have in one’s kitchen!

  In later years when I brought a girlfriend home it was the same. I didn’t feel as if my mother was vetting – though of course she formed judgments sharp as breaking glass. My overwhelming interest was in having sex with the young woman who had just arrived. Mother and girlfriend must have shared this unspoken. Was the lovemaking more intense as a result? I never thought about it in that way at the time. Reading a book or listening to music in my bedroom waiting for my mother to stop talking or listening to my girlfriend was like being a mimic octopus with an unseen tentacle wrapped around downstairs.

  With best wishes

  My earliest sexual experiences I talked about with her. There are phrases that still make me wince to think I said aloud. Like Monica Lewinsky in reverse. I did have sex with that woman. Mother I did. My mother and I had read Sons and Lovers. We had also read Lady Chatterley’s Lover. We were advanced Lawrentians. When I was seventeen I gave my father the small Penguin volume containing Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious. What is now most bizarre to me about this is that I inscribed the book to him: ‘Christmas 1975 – With best wishes’. Was I incapable of writing With love? What son writes to their father with best wishes for fox sake? The lifelong enigma of names and anonymity. A child is expected to move from Daddy to Dad. Daddy comes to sound infantile – or demonic. But I never felt comfortable with Dad. It always seemed a kind of brutality. I wanted him to have a name unlike anyone else. In the end I proposed Alias and he seemed pleased with this. I still think of him by that name. And as a child moves from Mummy to Mum the glibness feels still more indecent. I tended in later years to call her Ma or Mother but neither seemed right. I tried using her forename – Kate or even Kathleen – but that was no help either. But could I ever have inscribed a book to my mother With best wishes?

  And this present to my father in 1975 seemed an intriguing choice as well. By then I had already encountered Heidegger. A book about him had circulated in our A-level history class. Like a porn magazine under the desk from one boy to the next. I spent a while with it. It seemed simple as pie. The thrownness of being. The crossing out of tired words. As easy as Neil Young’s ‘Tired Eyes’. Heidegger’s dream of a new language for describing the world and human life. No problem with that. But I was also aware of the existence of Freud and this elicited a different response. I was determined not to read him. Not because I suspected he was baloney but because I was intensely interested in the question of how to write about the mind in a way that wouldn’t get sidetracked by his vocabulary. I had not read Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious or the Fantasia essay by Lawrence. I’d skimmed and skipped. I’d read enough to see that Lawrence was trying to huff and puff and rebuff without at the same time quoting a single sentence from Freud. I was impressed but sceptical. Giving this book to my father was another case of finding a way to not read a book myself.

  With best wishes? Was I out of my head?

  It was many years before I read anything of any great length at all. But I had grasped the correlation between a piece of writing and a bomb. Poetry did this. To read a novel by Jane Austen was as impossible for me as eating meat was to become. But a poem by Wordsworth or Keats or Eliot was like jumping into a clear lake on a burning hot day in the Alps. As I did with my brother in the Austrian Tyrol in the summer of 1969. Our ever-watchful gentle anxious mother standing by.

  In the same year that I gave my father his Christmas reading I discovered Wallace Stevens and Walt Whitman and Frank O’Hara. I would read to my mother late into the evening at the kitchen table. And I was writing poems by the dozen. I had no idea what I wanted to do in life except be a poet. To read or write a poem was to work with explosives like Guy Fawkes. An encounter with even the flimsiest lyric in Palgrave’s Golden Treasury had a potential for clear and present danger. But in the world of novels I had at least read Sons and Lovers. In part it was a terrible book of prophecy. I cannot recall it without subsuming it in the death of the brother. But the book was also a shocking scene of recognition. The ebullient intensity of a mother’s love and the love of a mother. Not that she and I spoke of it like that. But reading Sons and Lovers she knew I knew she knew we knew. Waiting for my girlfriend to finish talking with my mother was an integral part of my love life. Why would anyone want to terminate a conversation with my mother in order to have sex with me? Why would one wish to deny that conversation itself can be a way of having sex?

  Air

  With s
uch a portfolio how dire the decline. The endless days of unfinishable sentences. Thoughts begun but. Only disconnect. The obscene unseen undoing of short-term memory.

  And then the sickening smiling terror of the day I went to the care home. She’d been there a month. Her husband no longer able to cope. He and I visited together. She looked at me and didn’t recognise who I was.

  At first I thought I’d mistaken myself. As if I’d entered in error and needed to go back out of the woeful building and come back. As if if re-entering this time my mother would see me sure as eggs are eggs. I was catapulted away on an elastic band of myself. Even when I tried to recover my senses and accept that I hadn’t moved an inch I felt several yards along the corridor. Negotiating with a nurse and some other sorrow of a scarecrow of a former person. I was floored. As if getting to my feet after a fainting episode like the one I had with my mother in the supermarket in Cheam one too bright morning twenty-five years earlier. (It was an epileptic seizure. I felt driven to track a light moving across my field of vision till I smacked my head against a freezer and passed out. I’d bitten my tongue and for some minutes slept as if in Eden. I returned to consciousness to find my mother kneeling beside me on the floor and an ambulance waiting to take me away.)

  Afterwards I asked my father was it the same with him? No. He believed his wife still recognised him. Nothing of this nature had ever happened to me before. She looked and didn’t see her own son. It was worse than her telling me she was losing her marbles. Her mind was my loss alone. All one. Still the horror of the encounter had to be kept. To hold my mother’s gaze across the air in the supposition that some change would occur in the whorls of her soft blue eyes and a spark of remembrance restore her to me. But she shuffled her feet and turned away.