Family Romance

by John Lanchester

  Leaving B aside for awhile and returning to you. Why are you ‘not sure of yourself’? You are normal, intelligent, well-mannered, sociable. Why shouldn’t people like you? They do. Is it that you feel they shouldn’t and if they do, there is something wrong? You keep on looking for snags – of course you’ll find them. People like to provide you with what they think you want to find.

  One last thing about jealousy. It may be part of you – but you are bigger than it – it is only a part. And why should you be afraid of something less than you? Face it, and its cause, and don’t be afraid to fight it for what you want.

  You said something in your letter about writing about someone else and telling so much about yourself in the process. Well, if I thought long about all that your clinical eye must have found out about me through reading what I have written, I might panic! However, I don’t mind what I tell you – it’s in safe hands. It may not have occurred to you that I have done more talking than you have! Or rather, I have talked to you more freely than I have ever done to anyone else. And why should you even think of apologising for what you choose to call ‘talking my head off’. My head is as firmly in position as ever it was, thank you, and I like being talked to. Neither do your letters worry me; it is not very flattering of you to think they should. I like hearing from you, though of course I realise that I have run the risk in this letter of being struck off your list of correspondents!

  Not surprisingly, there is a bit of a gap in the correspondence after that. It is a psychologically acute letter, sharp to the point of mercilessness, and one of the most striking things about it is the definiteness with which Julie takes a position on the moral high ground. It’s clear in his letter that Bill is upset, but that doesn’t prevent her from delivering a lecture to the effect that it is all his fault. You can see here her experience as a teller-off, and as someone used to possessing the ethical upper hand. She is not even a tiny bit shy about telling Bill he’s to blame for the fact that he has been humiliatingly dumped by a girl who went off with his flatmate.

  It took some time for the correspondence to resume. Julie wrote Bill a couple of long letters – no further mention being made of this exchange – and he began to write back. The tone warms up, until on 2 August 1960, Bill has some momentous news: ‘I HAVE BEEN POSTED TO – HAMBURG!!’ His manager inevitably tried to stop him going, but was overruled. This was a huge deal for Bill, because for the first time he would be within easy visiting distance of England. He would be able to see his mother, and he would be able to keep in touch with any friends he made while staying with her in London – such as, for instance, Julie. There is a sense, when one reads the letters, that this is the point at which they began to think seriously of each other as potential partners. With Julie in London and Bill in Calcutta taking a break every three years, there wasn’t much point in seeing the relationship as having a future in anything other than friendship and letter-writing. There is an irony: if they had been playing boyfriend–girlfriend games, they would never have reached this point of candid intimacy, which enabled their relationship to grow closer and more serious. But they started falling for each other because they could talk frankly; and then a deus ex machina entered, in the unlikely form of the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank. With Bill in Hamburg, a mere hour’s flight from London, regularly visiting to see Lannie, this would change. Their letters warmed up. Bill was given a few days in London to prepare before moving to Hamburg in late October. Julie wrote to ask if, when he came to London in October, he would like to see Siobhan McKenna as Pegeen in Playboy of the Western World. He sent back a telegram saying YES YES YES.

  Those few days in London went very well. Bill and Julie, to use a favourite phrase of hers, ‘hit it off’. One of the things they spoke most about was families. At some early stage in talking to my father, Julie became aware that he wanted to have a large family. He felt he had paid a high price for being an only child, and he liked the idea of his own children having company; liked too, perhaps, the idea of himself as a patriarch. He was explicit about it, and he may have thought it was a selling point to the Catholic girl he was chatting up: he wanted to have lots of children.

  Another big topic was Julie’s excitement about the stories she had written, and which she had just heard were going to be broadcast on the BBC. After the break-up of her relationship with Tom Allen, Julie had begun to work on her writing for the first time. With this came an ability to see her life as it had been more clearly – to see the choices she had made and the decisions that had been forced on her. She had always wanted to write, but for obvious reasons had never been able to in the convent; now she started some autobiographical short stories about things that had happened to her in the convent. She had sent one to the BBC, and it had been accepted. Her first attempt, ‘My Hair and Me’, was to be broadcast on the radio, and she had been asked to read it herself. My mother was on the way to becoming a writer. She couldn’t use her own name, of course – word would get back to the family, or to the convent, or to the school, or something. So for the purposes of becoming a writer, Julia Gunnigan became Shivaun Cunningham. The pseudonym was my mother’s way of reducing the psychological exposure involved in writing, and a way of reducing any embarrassment to her family from people saying that they had heard her on the radio, and why wasn’t she still in the convent? And it was also a passive-aggressive way of marking her own territory. By now, her own life story was one of her very few possessions; she created Shivaun Cunningham as a way of having first claim to it. She owed nothing to anyone, not even her name. The day of the reading was the most exciting of her life.

  2

  Julie was, for the first time in years, genuinely happy. Her letters burn with a sense of possibility and new life. And Bill was happy, too. He loved Hamburg, where ‘the view down towards the city from the nearer bridge on a cold crisp night with a cold horrid little wind ruffling the water, and the brilliantly sharp neon signs, makes me glad to be alive – it’s so hard, cold, clear, and sharp.’ He loved the lakes and the lights and the scale and the Europeanness of it. He and Julie, who had both known hard times, felt that their lives were moving into a happier phase, and that each was a part of that. Bill invited her to Hamburg for Christmas. He would not be on holiday for the whole time – he was on duty at the bank – but they would have a chance to spend more time together than at any time previously.

  For Julie, though, this presented a big problem. To understand what she did next, we have to take stock of her life at this moment. She had already suffered two devastating setbacks in her life, one in the reaction of her parents when she left the convent for the first time, and the other in the death of Nicholas Royle, whom she loved and had intended to marry. She had had another crushing disappointment just over a year before, when her engagement with Tom Allen was abruptly broken off. She had spent fifteen years in convents, and was frightened that it was far too late to begin living her own life. She was convinced that the crucial factor in the breaking of her engagement with Tom Allen was her age: that, she felt, was the reason his mother had been able to force him to end the relationship. Her own equivocations and the wasted years in the convent had cost her the remains of her youth, and her last chance to have children. She was hitting forty – which, in 1960, meant a statistically tiny chance of having children. And then she met Bill. He was, in most respects, perfect. But he was explicit about wanting a big family.

  The invention or creation or simple use of ‘Shivaun Cunningham’ was, I think, indispensable to what she did next. To register its full import you have to understand that Julia was the kind of person who felt nervousness verging on a panic attack when she parked on a single yellow line out of hours, or returned a library book a day late. Her anxiety about obeying rules and laws was flat-out neurotic. (And, for anyone with an even slightly more relaxed, or indeed sane, point of view, maddening.) She paid bills on the day she got them, answered all letters of a business or financial nature by return, worried about whether she was on
the electoral register and where she had written down her NHS number, never got a parking ticket, hyperventilated if she was spoken to by a customs official or a policeman, was nervous about asking the doctor for anything at all. Neurotics are often very tough – they have to be, to withstand the blast furnaces of their own neuroses. By the same token, tough people are often highly neurotic. Julia had both sides of that circle in full. She was also someone who was very comfortable occupying the moral high ground – as you might expect in a person who had spent fifteen years in religious orders. She liked being in the right. The letter reproving Bill for being dumped by his girlfriend shows that; it is extraordinary to think of the gap between its high-minded, sermonising, not-far-off-priggish tone and the lie Julie was about to tell.

  But she was falling in love with Bill, or preparing to. And he wanted a big family. And she was going to be forty before she even went to Hamburg for Christmas. If he knew her age, he would not marry her. That’s what she told herself, and she was right, I think. Bill did want children, and having waited already till his mid-thirties to marry, could be prepared to wait a bit longer. If she told him her true age, she would lose her chance of marrying him; she would be the ex-nun who had left everything too late.

  So she did something so simple, radical, and criminal that, even with the documentary evidence in front of me, I can hardly believe it. What Julia did was in its way brilliant: she wsent off to the Irish Record Office and asked for a copy of the birth certificate of her sister Dilly, who was nine years younger than she. Then she used that birth certificate to apply for British citizenship, and lo and behold, Julia Immaculata Gunnigan became Bridget Teresa Gunnigan and, after her marriage, Bridget Teresa Lanchester, B. T. Lanchester, or sometimes, when she could get away with it, B. T. J. Lanchester. That was the name on all her official paperwork for the rest of her life. It is the name on my birth certificate – so the person named there as my mother is in reality my aunt Dilly. In short, Julia simply stole her sister’s identity, and kept it for the rest of her life.

  You may wonder why she went to such lengths, why she wasn’t content to lie, or rather, to lie in person only, rather than lie in person and legally and in her official paperwork. The answer is that she knew she would be found out. Julia had already disappeared once, when she ran away from home and was out of contact with her family for years in her youth. She knew what it took, and how important official pieces of paper and official identities are. She also had experience of international travel and official formalities; India is a world centre of bureaucracy and form-filling and paperwork. She knew there was no chance of indefinitely keeping the real date secret from her husband. She was right, too, since even the basic process of registering to get married in Hamburg involved giving details of her parentage and birth – so the purely spoken lie wouldn’t have lasted even through the engagement. She was right to go the whole hog.

  There were, I suspect, three reasons why, once she had the idea of legally becoming somebody else, it was Dilly’s identity that she stole. There were six other sisters to choose from, after all. I think the first reason was age: Dilly was not just younger but significantly younger, almost a whole decade. If she clipped off a year or two it would still have left her in her upper thirties, on the high side for starting a family in 1960. By pretending to be Dilly she was pretending to be thirty-one, with every chance of having not just one child but several children, as per Bill’s expressed wishes.

  The second reason was Dilly’s real name. If Julie and Bill married, however much distance she managed to keep between herself and the family back in Ireland, there would inevitably be talk about her relatives. Until very recently she had been living with Peggie, who had given her sympathy and succour and support in every practical way after she had left the convent in India. However she tried, Julie couldn’t hide from all the other Gunnigans for ever; which meant that there would be talk; which meant that the other sisters were likely to be mentioned in Bill’s hearing. But Dilly was always referred to as Dilly, then and to this day, and never by her given name of Bridget; and you would have to know vernacular Irish English quite well to know that Dilly was a diminutive of Bridget. Bill could hear Dilly mentioned without ever wondering why the Gunnigans had two daughters with the same Christian name.

  And the final reason for choosing Dilly may have had to do with Julia’s analysis of her sister’s character. Dilly was already married and had started a family: she was based in Claremorris, near her birthplace in the un-chic part of Mayo, and she was fully involved in her life in that place. She almost certainly – Julia calculated – did not have a passport; at that time she had no reason to have one. Furthermore, she was even less likely to apply for a British passport – there was essentially no prospect that she would ever do that. If she could get the birth certificate, Julia would be in the clear. She did and she was.

  Once the birth certificate arrived, Julia applied for a British passport under her sister’s stolen identity of Bridget Teresa Gunnigan. It came through in December 1960, and from then on, that was who she legally was. Julia Immaculata Gunnigan disappears from the paper trail and is never seen again. It was Bridget Teresa Gunnigan who went to stay with Bill in Hamburg over Christmas.

  The visit went well. Afterwards Julie would joke that Bill, who had grown accustomed to servants in the Far East, realised how useful it would be to have a woman about the place. But there was obviously much more to it than that, and it was only a matter of a few months and one more visit before the inevitable happened. Bill proposed marriage, and Julie accepted, on 27 May 1961. Lannie, now retired and living at Looe in Cornwall, sent a congratulatory telegram. The engagement ring drew favourable comment from Julie’s students, as Julie wrote to Bill:

  ‘Cor, that aint half a sparkler, Ma’am,’ and ‘Thinkin’ of floggin’ it, Ma’am, that’d get you some lolly’, and then ‘Are we havin’ you until the end of term?’ The staff, when they saw it, said more to the same effect, and also remarked that a ring like it had never appeared in the school before. Liz Wagenmaker said that she thought the extra light in the staff room this morning was shining from my face.

  Christmas 1960. You sense that this is not people’s first drink

  They had to attend to the practical arrangement for the wedding, which involved Julie sending Bill her details of birth and passport and so on.

  7 June 1961

  Dearest Bill,

  Thank you very much for your letter received last night when I got back from school and the dentist. I don’t know what to say about the cheque you sent me – for three hundred pounds – £300!! You are far too generous; it makes me quite ill when I think of all the money you have spent on me. Thank you very much – I can’t thank you enough, you are far too good. I did a little bit of shopping last week and now I am planning some more as you can imagine. I am determined to get as good value in goods and enjoyment out of it as possible, but I’ll tell you more about that later.

  My baptismal name is BRIDGET TERESA (without the ‘H’) JULIA but on my birth certificate, as distinct from my baptismal certificate my name is given as BRIDGET TERESA (without the JULIA) and BRIDGET TERESA (in that order and that spelling) is the name on my British passport No. 581537 dated Foreign Office 2 December 1960. The story goes that when my birth was registered either my father or the local registrar were drunk (or both were) and they omitted my third name. I prefer to use the three, especially as I am called Julie, but when I asked them at Petty France (the Passport Office) they said they use the name on the Birth Certificate only. I am a British Subject as I applied for registration as one when I got the passport and I have a certificate from the Home Office to that effect. I will fish it out and send it to you, though I may not have time to do it this evening as I have to go to the dentist again today.

  Thank you once again for all your generosity, darling. I hope you are not going short yourself on my account. I will write again soon. Much love and God bless you.

  Julie xxx
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  It’s artfully done. You wouldn’t spot the lie in that letter unless you already knew it was there – though there is the tiniest clue, the merest tip of the hand, in the locution ‘the story goes that …’

  The thing that shocks me about that letter is the date. She had taken out the false identity in December 1960. From that moment on, she must have known or suspected that something like this was coming. She made a plan, and it came to fruition seven months later. So all during the process of going to stay with Bill, falling in love, writing and travelling back and forth and all the other things they no doubt did, her scheme was working itself out. As their relationship moved into a new level of intimacy, she began a new level of planned and meticulous deceit. She of all people had the strongest imaginable views on the subject of lying and liars; yet here she was, building her entire future on a lie.

  G. W. Lanchester, known as Bill, and Bridget Teresa Gunnigan, known as Julie, were married on 25 August 1961. The wedding party was given by ‘Daddy’ Soul, he who had carried a revolver in Mukden in the wild 1930s. The couple went on a long weekend to the beaches of Denmark; the real honeymoon was to be in Italy in the autumn, zooming around in Bill’s Porsche. When that holiday came, though, there was to be a complicating factor, because the low-slung sports car and the twisty roads combined to worsen the acute morning sickness from which Julie was suffering, caused by me.