The change in her was symbolised by the flat. This had a small bedroom, a tiny second bedroom or study, and a sitting-dining room, and they were all utterly chaotic. You could hardly move for overflowing stuff – books, papers, clothes and CDs in particular, the bounty of the mail-order catalogues to which my mother, after her stroke, had become addicted. The contrast with the ultra-neat way she had always chosen to live was inescapable. She had always been someone who would not consider the day done unless everything had been tidied up and squared away – it wasn’t a question of not leaving the washing-up for the next day, it was a question of not leaving the washing-up for fifteen minutes. Now her home was like a bomb site. It was possible to see this as a loss – obviously it was a loss – but I don’t think it was only that. Her obsession with tidiness and order didn’t seem to have brought her much happiness, and although there was something oppressive about the chaos of her flat, there was also a sense that she had stopped minding about everything quite so much.
The years at Cloister House were a kind of coda to Julie’s life. She felt acutely what she had lost, and spoke with great wistfulness of her years in Norwich in particular – the contrast, I suppose, was to do not so much with loneliness, since she had been alone there too, but more with her health and her relative freedom of movement. (Not that she had actually used that freedom much, just as my father hadn’t much used the theoretical freedom he had won by earning a good living. People are always reluctant to ask themselves what price they’re paying for things they think they value, and whether they’re actually using freedoms they think they have.) She spoke also of her own good times being past: ‘et in Arcadia ego’, she was fond of saying, never failing to add the translation: I too have lived in Arcadia. So there was loss and sadness at having ended up in this small Wimbledon flat at the age of seventy-three (though only, of course, admitting to sixty-three).
Once this was accepted, Julie’s life wasn’t so bad – and it was to have some consolations, in terms of things she had always wanted. She had her friends and her routines, and saw much more of me. She liked the regular treats which were not hard to line up in London, such as trips to Bentley’s Oyster Bar, where she had gone on her second dinner out with Bill, and where she had drunk her second martini. She enjoyed meeting my friends and felt no need to qualify the sharpness of her opinions. ‘How’s X?’ she asked me once about a friend who had been depressed. ‘Has he lost that awful hangdog look?’ ‘I was very disappointed by Y,’ she said on meeting another friend of mine. ‘She looked like a cottage loaf.’ In the taxi on the way home after a party where she had met, for the first time, my agent, she announced firmly, ‘He’s very nice. I quite fancy him.’ Sometimes her remarks were pure Alan Bennett. ‘He didn’t seem at all well,’ she once remarked of my entirely healthy father-in-law. ‘Touch of Parkinson’s, I think.’ More than once, friends who met Julie for the first time would tell me that they thought she was ‘sweet’.
*
For all these years I had been someone who wanted to write. That is, for a certain type of young person, an identity in itself, almost a job in itself: ‘wanting to write’. It has to do with a sense that although you aren’t actually doing any writing – meaning, writing a book; I had done quite a bit of other kinds of writing – you have a secret identity, being a writer. This, your real self, protects you from the possibility that your other external self might become too real. It’s like being back at school and having a chit saying that you are ‘off games’, only here you have a chit saying you are ‘off life’. You don’t have to try too hard, work too hard, or care too much about anything, because it’s all a preliminary for the real task of being a writer – the larval or preliminary stage of ‘being’ a writer.
I should say in defence of my younger self that even at the time I knew this was a crock: I knew that writing was something you did, not something you were, and that there was no such thing as ‘being’ a writer or ‘wanting’ to write: the only thing that has any reality at all was actually writing. I knew this, but I found it impossible to act on the consequences of that knowledge. I had made a start on my first book and then conked out; I had now been sitting on the idea, incubating it, for seven years. My book was in the perfect state of suspended animation: I wanted to write it, and yet there I was, doing a highly successful job of not writing it.
A book should be an axe for the frozen sea within us. Kafka said that. In my case, writing the book needed an axe, or not one but several – the death of my father, a grown-up relationship, some therapy so I could be with myself for long enough to do the work, and finally, I believe, my mother’s stroke. It was not as if my mother had died: she was very much present, in most respects more present than she had been since childhood. But she was not the same. The Julia I had grown up with wasn’t there any more, and that was the final thing I needed to break up my particular frozen sea.
I think that is because by writing I was, on some level, reaching out to her; trying to get in touch with her; trying to get her attention. And I could not do that while there was a chance of actually getting her attention in life. While the mother I grew up with was present (or semi-present, or absent in her unique way), it was she with whom I was struggling. I wanted her gaze on me, and I wanted not to be anywhere near her, at the same time. I wanted to be absent-present in something resembling the same way she was. Once she had had her stroke, she was, to use a phrase many people used about her, ‘never the same again’. That meant it was now impossible to contact that person she had been; and that was what made me begin to reach out for her in the form of writing. I couldn’t get her attention in the way I had wanted it, so now I tried to get her attention on the page. And at the same time I knew that she couldn’t properly read what I was writing. That was the last trick pulled by fate and my unconscious: because Julie’s cognitive faculties weren’t what they had been, she couldn’t really read anything the way she had been used to – so she couldn’t read my book. That was what I needed in order to begin writing it.
I’ve said before that motives are difficult to unpick. Perhaps I’m proving the point here. What all this boils down to is: once my mother wasn’t able to read my books, I finally began writing them.
5
By the end of 1994, I had finished The Debt to Pleasure. I handed it over to Miranda, the first person to read it, on 31 December (and immediately came down with the flu). I told my mother about it shortly afterwards and she was pleased for me, as pleased as she could possibly be. She hadn’t been able to be a writer herself, for complicated reasons, but was delighted that I had managed to write a book. (The other things she would most have wanted me to be were a don and a priest – the latter an ambition she once let slip to one of the teachers at my school, who lost no time in passing the news on to me.) She came to a dinner celebrating the news that a publisher had bought my book, and came to the launch party too.
There were, however, moments of difficulty, as there always had been with my writing. She would ‘open the window and fling her chest out’ – she lent copies of it to, for instance, her GP: I found that out after her death, when I saw a polite note from him in the returned book. But sometimes it was as if my gaining some attention as a writer rubbed a sore nerve. A piece I wrote about how I only became interested in cooking in my twenties was brought to her notice by friends of hers, because I had talked about her influence on me. ‘It was only by starting to cook myself that I learned how much care and attention – how much love – had gone into all the meals cooked by my mother over the years. I am glad I found out about that,’ I wrote. My mother’s response: ‘Lots of people showed it to me, told me about it, but I didn’t think it was anything special.’ That, admittedly, was when she was in the residential home, and relations between us were spiky. When my book came out there were glimpses of the same attitude. It surfaced in particular over prizes. When I won a Betty Trask Prize, I invited her to the ceremony, run by the Society of Authors, a couple of weeks in advance. Dav
id Lodge, a writer Julie admired, was to be giving the prizes. It was something she said she looked forward to. But when the day came I was called by the warden of the sheltered accommodation, who said that Julie had got into her bath the night before and not been able to get out. Rather than pull the alarm cord, which was right there beside the bath and was specifically for that purpose, she had sat there all night until the warden’s rounds that morning. So obviously she wouldn’t be coming to the ceremony. OK, I thought – too much build-up, too much excitement. The next time I won a prize, the Whitbread First Novel Award, I told her two days before. Seamus Heaney, another writer she admired, would be there. She was delighted. Then at 2 p.m., with dinner and the ceremony to start at seven, she rang to say she couldn’t face coming. Simple as that, she couldn’t face it. I wasn’t able to talk her out of that frame of mind. OK, I thought. Lesson learned. The next time I won a prize, the Hawthornden, with the ceremony at the National Portrait Gallery, I kept the news to myself for a month and then, on the day, called her at 4 p.m. to say that a taxi was picking her up at six. That ceremony she made. She seemed pleased to be there.
There was clearly some tension here involving, if not envy, then a kind of generational rivalry. This is a tension that, I’ve noticed, exists more often in relations between different generations of women. Fathers and sons can be competitive: sons want to outdo their fathers, and there is a patricidal component to that; not all fathers are willing to be outdone. But there is a sense that fathers and sons are competing at some existential level, to see who does better on a basically level playing field. It often has to do with who is more of a man, or what kind of a man it is best to be. With mothers and daughters, it’s different. Younger generations of women often have completely different opportunities, both in terms of the practical things they’re allowed to do and in terms of the psychological support they’re given in doing them, and perhaps especially in respect to the reigning assumptions about women and their lives. Daughters often have objectively better life chances than their mothers – and this inevitably causes some generational tension, a kind of envy. The daughter thinks: it’s my turn. The mother thinks: if I’d had the chances you have; you don’t know how lucky you are; you’ll never know how easy you have it; you’ll never know what it was like for me. I think my success – in this context, I have to call it that – as a writer touched on some of those feelings for Julie. She was pleased for me and proud of me, and at the same time part of her wondered if the person garnering the applause and attention might not and should not have been her. I had had opportunities that Julie hadn’t. I would say those opportunities had to do less with time or ambition or education or anything practical than with psychological factors. But she might not have seen it that way. Between parents and children it should be the case that, as a friend once said to me, ‘Their pluses are never your minuses.’ That should always be true. But alas, it isn’t, not always.
In the summer of 1997 I was at the Hay-on-Wye Festival doing the last book event attached to the publication of The Debt to Pleasure – something I’d been devoted to for about the past eighteen months, and which made me feel like an employee of my own book, perhaps the vice president in charge of public relations. I had a call on my mobile from I no longer remember whom – I suppose it must have been Maureen the warden. My mother had had another stroke. I got through the ‘event’ and hurried back to London and to St George’s Hospital. My mother was conscious and not in danger; it had been a smaller stroke than the first.
If the years after the first stroke in 1992 were the coda to Julie’s life, the next year and a bit were the coda to the coda. Although the later stroke was a smaller one, it had more of an effect on her speech and short-term memory, and she minded that, especially the sensation of fumbling for words and picking the wrong one; her language had been such a central and powerful part of her that this was a very intimate betrayal. The memory problem meant that she was not quite as reliable managing on her own. I would occasionally go to take her out only to find that she had forgotten I was coming and had already eaten – which in practice tended to mean, she had got someone else to cook dinner for her. This used to make me angry at the time, and then, usually when I was on the way home from dropping her off, intensely sad. Her quality of life was markedly less good from this point on: she watched a lot more TV, went out less, and was less present when she was present. It was a worry. This is the cruellest of the reversals that happen when you look after an ailing parent: that instead of their worrying about you, you worry about them. You begin to be your parent’s parent. The terrible difference, though, is that when you’re being a parent to a child, they’re growing up, growing away with every day that passes, becoming stronger and more independent; with a parent, all these processes are going the other way. That’s the hardest thing about the passage of life when, in the words of a Doonesbury cartoon, ‘you find yourself talking to your parents and your children in the same tone of voice’.
I suppose I knew on some deep level that my mother’s death was coming. I didn’t necessarily know it would be soon. Bear in mind that as far as I knew she was sixty-seven, and it wasn’t so unreasonable to think that she had a good few more years to live.
‘I won’t be around for much longer,’ she told me once when I’d gone to pick her up from her flat in 1998. She had been saying this for as long as I could remember – at least since I was ten years old. But even people who always talk about the fact that they are going to die one day, do eventually die.
‘Rubbish. You’ll see Finn’ – my son, who was three months old – ‘walking down the road outside Trinity College Dublin sticking his waistcoat out.’
‘Do you think so?’ my mother said, her face lit up.
I picked Finn up to hand him to her.
‘He’s a handsome haggis,’ I said, and then, feeling as I lifted him the extra weight he’d gained, ‘and he’s also a heavy haggis.’
‘He doesn’t like being called a haggis,’ my mother said very firmly.
Your relationship with your parents changes when you have children. You see how much your children mean to you, and in many cases – in my case – you realise for the first time what love means; full, unconditional love. There are a couple of lines by W. H. Auden:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
In a relationship with a spouse or partner, I don’t think anyone ever really believes that – we’d all secretly prefer to be the one who is a little bit more loved. (As the French say, in love one always kisses, and the other always turns the cheek to be kissed.) That’s not the case with your children. You want to love them more than they love you, just as you want them to live longer, be happier, and have more opportunities. It’s this sudden sense of the expansion of love that transforms the world, to make it seem that you were always looking at it in black and white, and now it’s in colour. This is not to say that life is easier or fairer; just that, now, it’s in colour.
And then you think: this is how I made my parents feel when I was born. Because the flow of love between parents and children is so unstraightforward – being prone to blockages and kinks and diversions, periods of stagnation, re-routings underground, reversals of current – it is easy to forget how it once was, as pure and clear and simple as flowing water. (But then, the flow of water is also very complicated. Ask anyone who studies it.) The birth of a child reminds you of how things once were, except you are in a different role: this time you are the giver of unconditional love rather than its recipient. The switch in perspective is sudden, dramatic, jolting, and deeply moving. Very, very few things in life are a revelation – it’s one of those words used to mean ‘better than expected, slightly surprising’ – but this is, or can be.
I saw Julie in relative health for the last time in July 1998. It was the usual routine: she came over by minicab, I cooked her supper. At about seven the phone rang, with the warden at her sheltered housing in a state: Tesco had co
me to deliver some shopping and couldn’t get into my mother’s flat to leave it for her. She’d ordered some stuff and then forgotten about it. This was the kind of confusion or slip she would make – sometimes scarily (leaving things on the cooker, forgetting to turn taps off), other times, like this, not scarily at all. The shopping was sitting in the hallway and the frozen stuff was thawing. I drove over, sorted out the shopping, and made to leave. As I was going out my mother said:
‘I do miss you, you know.’
There was a real weight of feeling and love in her words. It came out of the blue, and was so unlike her, that I stopped dead.
‘I know, Mum. I miss you too.’
I went home. We spoke on the Friday, two days later, for the last time. The next morning, I was standing in the kitchen when the phone rang. It’s only now, when all the people I love most are together in our house, and the phone rings, that I realise something: for years, every time the telephone rang, I was worried that it would be bad news about my mother. I wasn’t even aware until after she died that part of me was going through a tiny cycle of fear and relief every time somebody phoned. I knew the call would come one day, and that was the day it did. A friend of my mother’s had gone to see her after breakfast but there was no reply when she knocked on the door, so she’d gone to get the warden. When they went in, my mother was lying on her side in bed, unable to speak or move. They called an ambulance. Miranda and I called a friend who agreed to take Finn for a few hours, and we drove to St George’s Hospital, where my mother was in A & E. Her head was turned to one side and her eyeballs were fixed in the corner of her eyes. She had had a massive stroke, and she did not move or speak again.
Family Romance Page 35