Family Romance

by John Lanchester

  I spent the next three weeks visiting St George’s Hospital every day, and essentially waiting for my mother to die. It’s not a time or set of feelings I would hope ever to live through again. I vividly remember driving round the small, half-untarmacked car park, hoping I wouldn’t be able to find a space, because that way I could put off the walk down to the main building, the lift ride to the fifth floor, and the experience of sitting with my silent, immobile mother for an hour or so. I remember looking at things on the drive over and wishing I were doing them instead – sitting in that park, going to that greyhound track, dropping in on those friends who had lived over there. I would take the slow route, round Clapham Common, rather than the quick route down by Wandsworth. When the traffic was bad, I felt the way a schoolboy feels when a test is postponed. When the automatic gate of the entrance to the car park was jammed, I sat happily in the queue. Don’t honk for the man to come and fix it – he’ll be along in his own good time. What’s the rush?

  Visiting people in hospital is hard work. Visiting someone you’re madly in love with who’s in only overnight, for something laughably minor, and is in a good mood, is hard work. Everything else is harder by degrees. I don’t quite know why – perhaps it’s because the sick have their attention by necessity directed elsewhere, so you always feel as if you’re making small talk. Either that or you’re talking about things that are all too important.

  With my mother there was no real talking at all. Occasionally she would seem to utter fragments of words – but only fragments, the beginnings of a word or sentence. One day we took Finn to see her, hoping he might get a reaction from her. I asked my mother if she was pleased to see him, and she said something that could have been ‘course’, as in ‘of course’. It didn’t get any better than that.

  Most of the time, I just sat with her. Sometimes I read, usually poetry, because she loved it, and usually from the old Oxford anthology edited by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch. Some of the time I told her about what had been going on elsewhere in our lives, which meant that mostly I talked about Finn. And a lot of the time I just sat and held her hand.

  The doctors asked me whether I wanted them to attempt to resuscitate her in the event of another seizure. I said no, since I had a clearish memory of her asking me to say that. So ‘DNR’ was written on her chart. But this caused me anxiety, not so much about my mother’s wishes, because I was pretty sure what those were, but about the teaching of the Catholic Church. This mattered to me not for my sake but for hers. I knew it was something she would want me to get right. And so, for the first and thus far only time in my life, I found myself taking her advice that ‘when you’re in trouble, you can always turn to the Js’. I called the Jesuit residence in Farm Street and asked to speak to the duty father. I explained my mother’s circumstances, said that I wasn’t Catholic but she was, and asked what the Church’s teachings were in this case. He said that the Church would not want ‘artificially to prolong life’. I asked him if this meant the DNR instruction was, in the circumstances, appropriate, and he said he thought that it was.

  It’s easier now, in hindsight, to see that what made things so difficult was the fact that I wanted my mother to die. That was the only possible release, for her and for me. No one could imagine that she was going to recover, and in the weeks after her stroke there was no improvement, so death was the only way out. But I could not bear to see that quite so starkly at the time. And I also wanted her to live, to have another twenty or thirty years with her, not for any good reason, or any reason that a consultant could tick off on a quality of life chart, but simply because she was my mother and I loved her and I wanted her to live as long as possible, and because I knew I would miss her horribly when she was gone. We want the people we love to live; wanting someone we love to die is an insult to our whole psychology, our deepest instincts.

  So it was a relief, in a way, even though it did not feel like one, when the ward sister called on a Thursday morning and I set off to hospital with Miranda. I had only just got up and was desperate for caffeine; there was a branch of the Seattle Coffee Company en route, and it would have been simple to stop for a fix; but I’m deeply grateful that I didn’t, because if I had, and had taken five or ten minutes to do it, I would never have known whether that was why I wasn’t there when my mother died. She had had either another stroke or an embolism on her lung. The doctors asked for my permission to do a post-mortem and said they would call me with the results, but they never got round to it. So I never knew what it was that killed her. I suppose that’s fair enough, since there were so many other things about her I didn’t know.

  There’s a lot to do when somebody dies. ‘The probate years’, a friend of mine once called the period of life when you find yourself dealing with all of this. My experience of my parents’ deaths was like that both times – in addition to the grief, there was so much administration to get through that it was like finding myself in charge of a small business. After I found the identity papers and the will – which she’d lodged at her bank – I began the business of registering for probate, paying off bills, clearing the balance owed to the taxman, settling my mother’s utilities accounts, closing her bank accounts, cancelling standing orders, stopping her various subscriptions and her mail, returning unopened all the various mail-order bits and pieces that arrived in the days after her death, arranging for estate agents to view and value the flat, first for probate purposes and then to put it on sale. Then there was the task of arranging her funeral, and going to see the priest to discuss the service, which was to be part of the regular Wednesday morning mass, six days after her death; he was a polite South African, a new priest who barely knew my mother, not the previous Father whom she had known and liked, which was a pity. There was also the cremation to arrange; it would take place immediately after the service; and there were the questions of who would and who wouldn’t go on from church to that, and then the funeral lunch afterwards and the question of who would and who wouldn’t go on to that.

  And then, the day before the funeral, talking to Miranda after dinner, I had the biggest surprise of my life. (I should say that Miranda remembers this conversation differently. She says she tiptoed around the subject carefully, and had reasons for thinking I would react badly.) We were chatting about nothing in particular when she said:

  ‘There’s something you don’t know about your mother.’

  This in itself was an unexpected sentence. The next one was:

  ‘I think your mother might have been a bit older than she said she was.’

  And then she told me that Peggie – who was worried that my mother’s doctors might be acting on inaccurate information – had told her my mother’s real age. In that moment, I knew; although it was the single biggest out-of-the-blue surprise I’d ever had, I knew it was true. I also had a sudden sense not only of what my mother had done, but also how she had done it. I realised it was true in the way that people realise that their spouse has been having an affair: I was gobsmacked with surprise, and yet I was aware that, somewhere in my unconscious, I had already known. Some kinds of knowledge have a chemical certainty to them, and they are usually things which touch on our deepest feelings – that’s to say, they touch on love.

  I felt the life story my mother had given out, in dribs and drabs, through stories and by implication and anecdote, take a giant lurch. I also felt the truth of something Edmund White wrote: ‘Family life binds strangers together.’ My mother, I realised, was much more of a stranger than I knew.

  This, I suppose, is where we came in. The things I found out immediately after my mother died sent me on a journey to find out more about her, and about my father, and by extension about myself. I think I had always known there were things I wasn’t told, but I had no idea of their extent. I had no idea of the consequences they had had for my mother. I wanted to know the story, and the meaning of the story – or what it means for me now, anyway. There’s no guarantee that I won’t see things differently in five or te
n years’ time. In fact, I expect to. That didn’t deter me from telling the story today, in the present. I came to feel I had no choice.

  What, more than anything else, I wanted to know, was my mother’s sense of what her own life had been. This became the most crucial issue, the central question: what was Julie’s sense of her own story? Did she see her life as a connected narrative, or as a series of things that had simply happened one after another? If she did see it as a story, what was the story about? Was this a story about a person who had told a lie, and who kept paying for it? Was it about a woman who had escaped twice, from home and from the convent, but who despite that had never quite managed to be happy? Was it a story about a woman who more than anything else wanted to write, but whose circumstances had arranged that she couldn’t write because she couldn’t tell the story she wanted to tell more than any other – her own? Was it a story about a woman who was saved by love, and who in turn gave everything up for love – a story about sacrifice? Or was it perhaps not a story at all – did she deliberately not connect the dots, for whatever reason – to protect herself from what it might make her feel, or because she chose not to second-guess those former selves? Did she think there was one self she had been who was the real self, truer to her inner being than the others, and was that Julia Gunnigan, or Sister Eucharia, or Julie Lanchester? Was it one of her fictional selves, even Shivaun Cunningham or B. T. J. Lanchester? Or was somehow the answer to every one of these questions, at different times, yes?

  Those were the things I most wanted to know, and those were the things I did not find out. Julie quite simply gave nothing away about her innermost feelings. She never spoke to anyone about these things; she never wrote a word about them; she left no evidence, not the tiniest bit. I’ve had to imagine myself into her skin and work out what she thought and felt. I think the likeliest thing is that her life story did not, to her, quite add up; that there were fundamental ruptures and discontinuities in it. There was some sense in which she was not fully present to herself.

  There are times when story-telling is indispensable; there are times when we have to tell a story about something to make sense of it. Julie couldn’t tell the story of her own life. For reasons I have tried to explain, I don’t think she could tell it even to herself. That left me with a deep, unappeasable wish to connect the dots and tell the story for myself – and also, perhaps, I presume to think, for her. I don’t think she could bear to tell the story of her life, but I believe that she did want it told. I hope so. We can want things that we can’t bear.

  I’ve come to think that the most revealing thing I knew about Julie were the last words she said to me in person: ‘I do miss you, you know.’ But she said it while I was right there; said it while I was standing in front of her. You don’t have to miss me, I’m right here, is what I might have said. But that would have been obtuse. I don’t think I was ever fully there for my mother, and I don’t think anyone else ever was either; and I think the reason for that is that she was never fully present herself. Some part of Julie was never in whatever space she was in; she was always under what the Catholic Church calls a ‘mental reservation’. She was telling the truth when she said she missed me: she did. She always had – always.

  Now that I know so much more about her life, I think, and feel, that this was the core of it for her, this sense that her attention was always slightly turned away, turned inward; she knew it, too, I think, knew it and regretted it and could not stop it. I know now both why she so much wanted to write her own story and why she felt she could not. She passed that ambition on to me, and did it without ever explicitly telling me about it: she let it sink in, by osmosis, or like ink-dyeing. But it isn’t that which made me a writer. More than anything else, what made me a writer was the way she left me reaching for the one thing I could never quite have, even when she was alive, and which I now can never have: her attention. I had to wait for it to be gone before I began to write, and now I know I will always be reaching for it, and will never get it. That’s just the way it is. I reach for it every time I sit down to write, this thing I will never have, this thing which was always already lost to me, and that I am reaching for as I sit here even now writing this sentence.

  In the end, one thing I do know is what I should put on her grave. Last week I wrote to the parish priest in Manfield, where the Lanchesters are buried, apologising for the delay in finding an inscription for my mother. In a few days’ time I’m expecting a call from the stonemason, telling me that the inscription is ready, and then I’ll drive up to North Yorkshire where my parents are buried and look for the first time at the carved words:

  And his wife Julie Lanchester, who died on 6 August 1998, aged 77 years.

  There is something abrupt about summarising my mother, who was several people, with the one-word name ‘Julie’ and the one word ‘wife’. But she herself said that was the role in which she was happiest, so I don’t think she would object. As for the age, that decision seems simple. It is at last time for her to be free of her secret, which did not make things easy for her in life, and should now leave her in peace.

  Acknowledgements

  I would like to thank my aunt Peggie Geraghty. Without her generous help I would not know my mother’s full story, and I could not have written this book. That is not to say that she agrees at every point with this version of events and people. The same thanks are owed to Siobhán and Vincent Geraghty. I would also like to thank, and with the same caveat, my uncle John Gunnigan. In addition I thank his wife, Mary Theresa, and their children, Pat, Louie, Thaíg, Marianne, John, and Jane. I owe thanks to the Stauntons, especially Margaret, Marion, Jane and Rosín; the Kerrs; and the Brownes, for the unfailing kindness, hospitality and friendliness they have shown me. I thank Bernadette Duca, and her children Bernard and Moya; Joan, Alf, Adrian and Richard Linden; Miriam Bailey; John Kelly; Clair Wills; Andrew O’Hagan; Nicholas Jenkins; Jon Riley; Claudia Fitzherbert; Mary-Kay Wilmers; and Anna Jardine. Any errors or omissions are mine, all mine.

  It’s hard to know where to begin with the writers from whom I’ve learnt about Ireland, because, to borrow a compliment William Empson paid T. S. Eliot, I’m not sure how much of my mind they invented. I would like to make particular mention of Brian Friel, Seamus Heaney, Greta Jones, Roy Foster, J. J. Lee, Seamus Deane, John Banville, and Colm Toibín. For the period of my mother’s life during which she was in the convent, and just after she left it, I owe a debt of understanding to Monica Baldwin, Elizabeth Kuhns, and especially Karen Armstrong.

  I once found myself listed in the Acknowledgements section of a book – an anthology – and couldn’t work out why I was there. After thinking about it for a long time I finally remembered that I had once photocopied something for the editor. That, I suspect, is the smallest thing for which anyone has ever been thanked in an Acknowledgements section. I don’t know the biggest thing for which anyone has ever been thanked, but for her support while I was writing this book, I hereby nominate my wife, Miranda.

  The photographs here, and here are republished by kind permission of the Imperial War Museum.

  Every effort was made to track down C. K. Norman – the author of the poem ‘A Farewell to Stanley’ – or his Estate, but unfortunately without success. If any reader has further information on C. K. Norman, Faber and Faber would be pleased to hear from them.

  About the Author

  John Lanchester was born in Hamburg in 1962. He has worked as a football reporter, obituary writer, book editor, restaurant critic, and deputy editor of the London Review of Books, where his pieces still appear. He is a regular contributor to the New Yorker. He has written three novels, The Debt to Pleasure, Mr Phillips and Fragrant Harbour, and two works of non-fiction: Family Romance, a memoir; and Whoops!: Why everyone owes everyone and no one can pay, a book about the global financial crisis. His books have won the Hawthornden Prize, the Whitbread First Novel Prize, E. M. Forster Award, and the Premi Llibreter, been longlisted for the Booker Prize, and been tr
anslated into twenty-five languages. He is married, has two children and lives in London.

  Copyright

  First published in 2007

  by Faber and Faber Ltd

  Bloomsbury House

  74–77 Great Russell Street

  London WC1B 3DA

  This ebook edition first published in 2011

  All rights reserved

  © John Lanchester, 2007

  The right of John Lanchester to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

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