Nothing to Be Frightened Of

  He collected the British Empire, I the Rest of the World. He was bottle-fed, I breastfed, from which I deduced the bifurcation of our natures: he cerebral, I soppy. As adolescent schoolboys, we used to leave our house in Northwood, Middlesex, each morning, and set off on a journey of an hour and a quarter, by three different Underground lines, to our school in central London; in the late afternoon, we returned by the same route. In our four years of making this joint journey (1957–61), my brother would not only never sit in the same compartment as me; he would never even take the same train. It was an older/younger brother thing; but also, I subsequently felt, something more.

  Does any of this help? Fiction and life are different; with fiction, the writer does the hard work for us. Fictional characters are easier to “see,” given a competent novelist—and a competent reader. They are placed at a certain distance, moved this way and that, posed to catch the light, turned to reveal their depth; irony, that infrared camera for filming in the dark, shows them when they are not aware that anyone is looking. But life is different. The better you know someone, the less well you often see them (and the less well they can therefore be transferred into fiction). They may be so close as to be out of focus, and there is no operating novelist to dispel the blur. Often, when we talk about someone very familiar, we are referring back to the time when we first properly saw them, when they were held in the most useful—and flattering—light at the correct focal distance. Perhaps this is one reason why some couples stay in manifestly impossible relationships. The usual factors—money, sexual power, social position, fear of abandonment—doubtless apply; but the couple might also simply have lost sight of one another, be still working on an outdated vision and version.

  Journalists occasionally ring me up when profiling someone I know. What they want are, first, a pithy character description, and secondly, some illustrative anecdotes. “You know him/her—what’s he/she really like?” Simple-sounding; but increasingly I don’t know where to begin. If only a friend were a fictional character. So you start, for instance, with a string of approximate adjectives, like a gunner seeking to bracket a target; but you immediately feel the person, the friend, beginning to disappear, from life into mere words. Some anecdotes illustrate; others remain freestanding and inert. A journalist profiling me a few years ago rang an obvious source in the Creuse. “I know nothing about my brother,” was the response he got. I don’t think this was fraternal protectiveness; maybe it was irritation. Or perhaps, philosophical truthfulness. Though my brother might disagree that it was “as a philosopher” that he denied knowing me.

  An anecdote about my brother and me. When we were little, he used to put me on my tricycle, blindfold me, and push me as fast as possible into a wall. I was told this by my niece C., who had it from her father. I have absolutely no memory of it myself, and am not sure what, if anything, to deduce from it. But let me dissuade you from an immediate conclusion. It sounds to me like the sort of game I would have enjoyed. I can imagine my yelp of pleasure as the front tyre hit the wall. Perhaps I even suggested the game, or pleaded for it to be replayed.

  I asked my brother what he thought our parents were like, and how he would describe their relationship. I have never asked him such things before, and his first reponse is quite typical: “What were they like? I really don’t have much idea: when I was a boy, questions like that didn’t seem to arise; and later was too late.” Nonetheless, he addresses the task: he thinks they were good parents, “reasonably fond of us,” tolerant and generous; “in their moral characters highly conventional—better, typical of their class and period.” But, he continues, “I suppose their most remarkable characteristic—tho’ not at all remarkable at the time—was the complete, or almost complete, lack of emotion, or at any rate, lack of public expression of emotion. I don’t recall either of them being seriously angry, or frightened, or delirious with joy. I incline to think that the strongest feeling Mother ever allowed herself was severe irritation, while Father no doubt knew all about boredom.”

  If asked to draw up a list of Things Our Parents Taught Us, my brother and I would be at a loss. We were given no Rules for Life, yet expected to obey intuited ones. Nothing of sex, politics, or religion was mentioned. It was assumed we would do our best at school, then university, get a job and, probably, marry, and, perhaps, have children. When I search my memory for specific instructions or advice laid down by my mother—for she would have been the lawgiver—I can only recall dicta not specifically aimed at me. For instance: only a spiv wears brown shoes with a blue suit; never move the hands of a clock or watch backwards; don’t put cheese biscuits in the same tin as sweet ones. Hardly urgent copy for the commonplace book. My brother cannot remember anything explicit either. This might seem the odder, given that our parents were both teachers. Everything was supposed to happen by moral osmosis. “Of course,” my brother adds, “I think that not offering advice or instruction is a mark of a good parent.”

  Chapter 46

  In childhood we have the self-satisfied delusion that our family is unique. Later, the parallels we discern with other families tend to be tied to class, race, income, interests; less often to psychology and dynamics. Perhaps because my brother lives only eighty miles from Chitry-les-Mines, where Jules Renard grew up, certain similarities now present themselves. Renard père et mère sound like an extreme, theatrical version of our parents. The mother was garrulous and bigoted; the father silent and bored. François Renard’s vow of trappism was such that he would stop speaking in the middle of a sentence if his wife entered the room, and resume only after she had left; with my father, it was more that he was obliged to be silent because of my mother’s loquacity and assertion of primacy.

  The Renards’ younger son Jules—my name too—could hardly stand his mother’s presence; he was able to greet her and allow himself to be kissed (though would never kiss back), but could not bear to say more than the minimum, and used every excuse not to visit her. Though I put in more consecutive hours with my mother than Renard did with his, it was achieved only by switching to a mode of absence and reverie; and while I felt sorry for her in her widowhood, I could never, on those later visits, bear to stay the night. I couldn’t face the physical manifestations of boredom, the sense of my vital spirits being drained away by her relentless solipsism, and the feeling that time was being sucked from my life, time that I would never get back, before or after death.

  I remember from my adolescence a very small incident whose emotional resonance was preternaturally large. One day, my mother told me that Dad had been prescribed reading glasses, but was self-conscious about them, and so it would help if I were to comment approvingly. I nerved myself, and duly ventured the uninvited opinion that he looked “distinguished” in his new specs. My father glanced at me ironically, and didn’t bother to reply. I knew at once that he had seen through the ploy; I also felt that I had in some way betrayed him, that my false praise would make him more self-conscious, and that my mother had exploited me. It was, of course, no more than a homeopathic dose compared to the toxic pharmacology of some families’ lives; and in message-bearing it was nothing to what the young Jules Renard was once obliged to do. He was still a boy when his father—unwilling to break his silence even in extreme circumstances—sent Jules to his mother with a simple request: to ask, on his behalf, if she wanted a divorce.

  Renard said: “To have a horror of the bourgeois is bourgeois.” He said: “Posterity! Why should people be less stupid tomorrow than they are today?” He said: “Mine has been a happy life, tinged with despair.” He records being hurt when his father didn’t say a single word to him about his first book. My parents managed a little better, even if they seemed to have taken inspiration from Talleyrand’s maxim about not exhibiting too much zeal. I sent them the novel not called No Weather as soon as it was published. Complete silence for two weeks. I rang up; my father didn’t even mention having received the book. A day or two later, I went down to visit them. After an hour or so of
small talk—i.e. listening to my mother—she asked me to drive Dad to the shops: a highly untypical, indeed unique, request. In the car, now that eye contact was no longer possible, he told me, sideways, that he thought the book well-written and funny, though he’d found the language “a bit lower-deck”; he also corrected a gender mistake in my French. We kept our eyes on the road, shopped, and returned to the bungalow. My mother was now in a position to give her view: the novel “made some points,” she conceded, but she hadn’t been able to bear the “bombardment” of filth (in this, she agreed with the South African board of censors). She would show friends the cover of the book, but not allow them to look inside.

  “One of my sons writes books I can read but can’t understand, and the other writes books I can understand but can’t read.” Neither of us wrote “what she would have wanted.” When I was about ten, I was sitting with her on the top deck of a bus and unspooling one of those whirls of mild fantasy that come so easily at that age, when she told me I had “too much imagination.” I doubt I understood the term, though it was clear that what was being referred to was a vice. Years later, when I started using that denigrated faculty, I deliberately wrote “as if my parents were dead.” Yet the paradox remains that there is, behind most writing, at some level, a vestigial desire to please your parents. A writer might ignore them, might even seek to offend them, might knowingly write books he would expect them to hate; yet some part of him still suffers disappointment when he fails to please them. (Though if he did please them, a different part of him would be disappointed.) This is a common occurrence, if a matter of frequent surprise to the writer. It may be a cliché, but it didn’t feel like one to me.

  I remember a curly-haired boy who definitely had “too much imagination.” He was called Kelly, lived further down the road from us, and was a bit weird. One day, when I was six or seven, and on my way home from school, he stepped out from behind a plane tree, stuck something into the middle of my back, and said, “Don’t move or I’ll plug you.” I froze, being correctly terrified, and stayed there, in his power, wondering if he would release me, not knowing what was pressed hard into my back, for an unguessable length of time. Were any further words uttered? I don’t think so. I wasn’t being robbed: it was the purest form of hold-up—one in which the hold-up itself is the entire point. After a sweaty couple of minutes, I decided to risk death, and fled, turning as I did so. Kelly was holding in his hand an (old-style, round-pinned, fifteen-amp) electric plug. So why did I become a novelist rather than he?

  Renard, in his Journal, expressed the complicated wish that his mother had been unfaithful to his father. Complicated, not just in its psychology, but also in its weighting. Did he think this would have been a fair revenge for his father’s punitive silences; did he imagine it would have made her a more relaxed and companionable mother; or did he want her to be unfaithful so that he could have an even lower opinion of her? During my mother’s widowhood, I wrote a short story set in the recognizable ground plan of my parents’ bungalow (a “superior chalet” in estate agents’ terminology, I later discovered). I also used the basic ground plan of my parents’ characters and modes of interaction. The elderly father (quiet, ironic) is having an affair with a doctor’s widow in a neighbouring village; when the mother (sharp-tongued, irritating) finds out, she responds—or so we are invited to believe, though we may not be quite certain—by assaulting him with heavy French saucepans. The action—the suffering—is seen from their son’s point of view. Though I based the story on a septuagenarian dégringolade I heard about elsewhere, which I then grafted on to my parents’ home life, I didn’t deceive myself about what I was up to. I was retrospectively—posthumously—giving my father a bit of fun, of extra life, of air, while exaggerating my mother into a demented criminality. And no, I don’t think my father would have thanked me for this fictional gift.

  Chapter 47

  I saw my father for the last time on 17 January 1992, thirteen days before his death, at a hospital in Witney, some twenty minutes’ drive from where my parents lived. I had agreed with my mother that we should visit him separately that week: she would go on the Monday and Wednesday, I on the Friday, she on the Sunday. So the plan was for me to drive down from London, have lunch with her, go and see Dad in the afternoon, then drive back to town. But when I got home (as I continued to call my parents’ house long after I had a home of my own), my mother had gone back on the arrangement. It was something to do with laundry, and also fog, but mainly it was to do with being absolutely bloody typical of my mother. In all my adult life I can’t remember a single occasion—apart from that set-up literary drive to the shops—when my father and I were alone together for a stretch of time. My mother, even when out of the room, was always there. I doubt it was fear of being talked about behind her back (in any case, she was the last topic I would have wanted to discuss with my father); it was more that no event in the house, or outside it, was validated without her presence. And so she was always there.

  When we got to the hospital, my mother did something—again entirely typical—which made me cringe at the time, and rage ever since. As we approached my father’s room, she said she would go in first. I assumed this was to check that he was “decent,” or for some other unspecified wifely purpose. But no. She explained that she hadn’t told Dad I’d be coming that day (why not? control, control—of information, if nothing else) and that it would be a nice surprise. So in she went. I hung back, but could see Dad slumped in his chair, head on chest. She kissed him and said, “Raise your head.” And then, “Look who I’ve brought.” Not, “Look who’s come to see you,” but “Look who I’ve brought.” We stayed about half an hour, and my father and I had two shared minutes about an FA Cup match (Leeds o, Manchester United 1—a Mark Hughes goal) we’d both seen on television. Otherwise, it was like the previous forty-six years of my life: my mother always present, nattering, organizing, fussing, controlling, and my relationship with my father reduced to an occasional wink or glance.

  The first thing she said to him in my presence that afternoon was, “You look better than you did when I last came, you looked terrible then, terrible.” Next she asked him, “What have you been doing?” which seemed a pretty daft question to me—and to my father, who ignored it. She followed this with subsidiaries about TV watching and newspaper reading. But something had been ignited in my father, and five minutes later, exasperated—and doubly so by his impaired speech—he gave her his reply. “You keep asking me what I’ve been doing. Nothing.” It was uttered with a terrible mixture of frustration and despair (“The word that is the most true, the most exact, the most filled with meaning, is the word ‘Nothing.’”). My mother chose to ignore the remark, as if Dad had lapsed into bad manners.

  When we left, I shook his hand as I always did, and put my other hand on his shoulder. As he said goodbye, twice, his voice cracked into an eerie alto croak, which I took for some laryngeal malfunction. Later, I wondered if he knew, or strongly suspected, that he would never see his younger son again. In all my remembered life, he never told me that he loved me; nor did I reply in kind. After his death, my mother told me that he was “very proud” of his sons; but this, like much else, had to be osmotically deduced. She also said, to my surprise, that he was “a bit of a loner,” adding that his friends had become her friends, and that by the end she was closer to them than he was. I do not know if this was true, or a monstrous piece of self-importance.

  A couple of years before his death, my father asked if I had a copy of Saint-Simon’s Mémoires. I did—a rather poncey, twenty-volume edition, bound in scarlet leather, which I had never opened. I brought him the first volume, which he read in a spine-breaking manner; and then, on subsequent visits, as requested, the following ones. Sitting in his wheelchair, while cooking duties briefly spared us my mother’s presence, he would recount some piece of cut-throat politicking from the court of Louis XIV. At a certain point in his final decline, another stroke skewed some of his intellectual fac
ulties: my mother told me that she had three times found him in the bathroom trying to pee into his electric razor. But he carried on with Saint-Simon, and when he died, he was in the middle of volume sixteen. A red silk bookmark still shows me the last page he read.

  According to his death certificate, my father died of a) stroke; b) heart trouble; and c) abscess on the lung. But these were the things he was treated for in the last eight weeks of his life (and the time before that), rather than what he died of. He died—in unmedical terms—of being exhausted and giving up hope. And “giving up hope” isn’t a moral judgement on my part. Or rather, it is, and an admiring one: his was the correct response of an intelligent man to an irrecoverable situation. My mother said she was glad I hadn’t seen him towards the very end: he was shrunken, had stopped eating and drinking, and didn’t speak. Though on her final visit, when asked if he knew who she was, he had replied with what were perhaps his last words: “I think you’re my wife.”

  Chapter 48

  On the day my father died, my sister-in-law, calling from France, insisted that my mother not be left alone in the house that night. Others urged the same, and advised me to get some sleeping pills (for sleep, that is, not suicide or murder). When I arrived—with some reluctance—my mother was robustly derisive: “I’ve been alone in the house every night for eight weeks,” she said. “What’s different now? Do they think I’m going to . . .” She stopped, looking for the end of her sentence. I suggested, “. . . top myself?” She accepted the words: “Do they think I’m going to top myself, or burst into tears, or do something stupid like that?” She then expressed a lively contempt for Irish funerals: for the number of mourners, the public wailing, and the widow being supported. (She had never been to Ireland, let alone to a funeral there.) “Do they think I’ll have to have somebody to hold me up?” she asked scornfully. But when the undertaker came to discuss her requirements—the simplest coffin, just a spray of roses, with no ribbon and absolutely no cellophane—she interrupted him at one point to say, “Don’t think I grieve any the less for him because . . .” This time, her sentence didn’t need completing.