Coventry Read online

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  ‘Make her stop!’ my daughters used to beg me when they were younger and one was doing something the other didn’t like. In other words: restore to me the primacy of my version; rid me of this challenge to the experience of being me. One might say that what they wanted was justice, impartiality – but impartiality, I usually discovered, was not easy to attain. There were always two sides to their stories, and I lacked the ability to turn them into one. I have prided myself on my willingness to object to injustices, to speak my mind when I thought I saw wrong being done. But perhaps all I was ever doing was trying to make it stop, trying to return the world to something I could bear to live in, without necessarily understanding it first.

  It strikes me that good manners would be the thing to aim for in the current situation. I have made a resolution, which is to be more polite. I don’t know what good it will do: this might be a dangerous time for politeness. It might involve sacrifices. It might involve turning the other cheek. A friend of mine says this is the beginning of the end of the global order: he says that in a couple of decades’ time we’ll be eating rats and tulip bulbs, as people have done before in times of social collapse. I consider the role that good manners might play in the sphere of rat-eating, and it seems to me an important one. As one who has never been tested, who has never endured famine or war or extremism or even discrimination, and who therefore perhaps does not know whether she is true or false, brave or a coward, selfless or self-serving, righteous or misled, it would be good to have something to navigate by.

  Making Home

  A woman once told me about a visit she made with her husband to an oncologist, to receive the results of his biopsy. She was perhaps in her late sixties, a grandmother, married for forty-odd years. They were kept waiting for a long time, a tense interlude in which she occupied herself with the question of how she would redesign the waiting room if it had to become their permanent home. She had created domestic spaces for so many years, she said, that such thoughts had become a sort of mental tic, a reflexive action she performed to soothe herself. By the time she had resolved the various problems of insufficient light, wrongly positioned doorways and an institutional style of decor, the wait was over and they were called in for their appointment – where, thankfully, she said, the news was better than expected.

  As is often the case when people are honest, these remarks struck me as deeply familiar while at the same time creating in me a strong desire to disown them. Not long before, I was driven to what appeared to be the brink of mental and physical collapse by embarking on the complete remodelling of our London flat, and while it was true that my children and I were now enjoying the benefits of living in a more pleasant environment, I still felt a certain sense of shame at how determinedly I brought these events about. I caused walls to be knocked down and floors to be ripped up and rooms to be gutted; I threw away decades’ worth of clutter and keepsakes and old furniture; with what at times seemed like magic and at others sheer violence, I caused the past to be obliterated and put something new, something of my choosing, in its place. At home, everywhere I looked I now seemed to see a hidden part of myself that was publicly exposed: the numberless private decisions I had made, from the colours on the walls to the bathroom taps, were exhibited for all to see. What’s more, the very people – my family and friends – for whom this vision was realised threatened by their presence to defile it. I flinched when they sat on the new sofa, and I darted nervous glances at their shoes strolling imperviously over the unmarked floor; every scratch and scrape and stain felt as if it were being inflicted directly to my own flesh. I carped at my two adolescent daughters for leaving their possessions strewn over the furniture and berated them for the evidence they left of themselves in the kitchen. At the time I felt myself to be serving the reality of my domestic life with them – enhancing it, dignifying it – but now it almost seemed as if what I really wanted all along was to erase it.

  The ‘old’ flat had been thickly carpeted in a spongy brown wool that caused me not the merest flicker of identification as it underwent the pummellings of daily life; in the cramped kitchen, whose orange-tiled walls and floor gave it something of the dim atmosphere of a butcher’s shop, people had happily sat wedged around the table in the murky light on an assortment of chairs and stools of different heights. We had inhabited the old warren of rooms almost with the carefreeness of children, for in a sense those rooms were not ours, not the product of our will or design; yet that same feeling of lawlessness seemed also to create the possibility of getting lost. We were forever searching for one another, calling, wandering from room to room. Sometimes it was hard even to know whether anyone was at home: the thick carpet doggedly absorbed the sounds of life.

  We were both more and less ourselves in that undistinguished space, less burdened but less anchored too; freer and yet unreflected, for nothing there gave us back an image of ourselves. When people visited, I felt the need to offer explanations: I would describe what was going to be done to it and what it would look like, as though creating a home out of mere words, and watch their faces brighten as the vision transferred itself from my head to theirs. One day an acquaintance came round, and before I could embark on my tale, he remarked, running his hand fondly over the peeling laminate kitchen counter, on how rare and refreshing it was to be somewhere untransfigured, somewhere of an authentic ugliness that didn’t look like a photograph in a magazine or a poor imitation of one. He complimented me on taking this stand against the ubiquity of middle-class tastes; he appeared to view it as an artistic and philosophical position. Don’t ever change it, he said with a small smile. I’ll be disappointed if you do.

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  I grew up in a succession of moderately grand houses where the nicest rooms were the ones no one was allowed to use: the drawing room with its dustless ornaments and immaculate cream-coloured sofas, the spare room where the mahogany furniture gleamed and the white bed sheets were always crisp and clean, the study with its unread leather-bound volumes, as forbidding as if it were conserving the memory of someone important who once worked there. Those rooms were full of the tension and silence of a museum: time had stopped there; something above the human had been allowed to take hold. Whom and what were they for? It had seemed ridiculous, but perhaps it was no more ridiculous than the objet d’art standing unused in the museum. In their way these rooms were expressive works, attempts to perfect reality and hold it in an eternal moment. They told me something about the person – my mother – who created them. What they seemed to suggest was that she would never be happier than in the home she made for us, at the times when we weren’t there.

  We moved house often, and each time it appeared that it was the perfecting of our environment that was causing us to leave it, as though living there had been a process of construction that was now complete. In much the same way as an artist’s deepest moments of intimacy with a canvas half-consciously generate the need or desire to rid himself of it, my mother perhaps felt a gathering frenzy as she bequeathed her domestic vision to us, for the sight of us starting to make ourselves comfortable there was surely the proof that the picture was finished. The summons of the unknown generally overrides sentiment; possibly, it feeds off it. To continue creating, a person perhaps has to maintain an essential discomfort in the world. The kitchen, where my mother spent most of her time, was often the smallest and dowdiest room in the houses we lived in; and I, too, have found myself working over the years in cramped bedrooms or at the kitchen table, even when a degree of prosperity would have permitted me to claim the much-vaunted room of my own.

  In Italy once, I was given a private tour of a beautiful castle, led by the owner through room after impeccably furnished room, only to glimpse at the end through a half-open door a tiny, cave-like space crammed with all the evidence – a gas stove, a television, a tatty sofa – of daily life: this was clearly where the family spent their time. I have often looked at photographs of writers in their elegant book-lined studies a
nd marvelled at what seems to me a mirage of sorts, the near-perfect alignment of seeming with being, the convincing illusion of mental processes on public display, as though writing a book were not the work of someone capable of all the shame and deviousness and cold-heartedness in the world.

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  One of my daughters has a friend whose house she likes to spend time in. It’s a cheerful, comfortable house, always full of people and food. There are the right number of parents in residence and enough attention to go around. It’s tasteful and cultured in an unfussy kind of way; the bookshelves are laden, the walls crammed with paintings; there’s a dog lying contentedly on the threadbare Persian rug. She can eat on the sofa there, as she can no longer do at home. It looks like a place where people create things, with none of the tensions I associate with creativity: the silence, the solitude, the unappeasable need for the world to disappear so that concentration can occur. For a time I am slightly jealous of her attraction to this household, though I understand it perfectly, for it embodies certain principles of living – generosity, tolerance, the recognition of the human as the pre-eminent value – that I myself hold dear while frequently feeling unable to deploy them in my own home. Like the body itself, a home is something both looked at and lived in, a duality that in neither case I have managed to reconcile. I retain the belief that other people’s homes are real where mine is a fabrication, just as I imagine others to live inner lives less flawed than my own. And like my daughter, I, too, used to prefer other people’s houses, though I am old enough now to know that, given a choice, there is always a degree of design in the way that people live. The man who admired my peeling Formica was crediting me with, or accusing me of, doing something deliberate, and I don’t doubt that the apparent artlessness of my daughter’s adopted household is, however half-consciously, a result of a carefully considered set of convictions. That those convictions so closely echo my own makes the illusion – if illusion it is – more tantalising still.

  Entering a house, I often feel that I am entering a woman’s body, and that everything I do there will be felt more intimately by her than by anyone else. But in that house it is possible to forget entirely – as the passengers on the top deck of a liner can forget the blackened, bellowing engine room below – what is surely nonetheless true: that a home is powered by a woman’s will and work, and that a curious form of success could be measured in her ability to suggest the opposite. I can’t see any difference, in my daughter’s adopted household, between what it is and what it seems to be – the home of a kind, artistic and educated woman – and yet I find myself unable to believe that difference isn’t there.

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  ‘The house a woman creates is a Utopia,’ wrote Marguerite Duras. ‘She can’t help it – can’t help trying to interest her nearest and dearest not in happiness itself but in the search for it.’ The domestic, in other words, is ultimately more concerned with seeming than with being: it is a place where personal ideals are externalised or personal failures made visible. These ideals, as well as the forms of failure they create, are ever-changing: the ‘search for happiness’ is a kinetic state, and it follows that the most seductive of all the illusions of homemaking would be the illusion of permanence.

  The novelist Iris Murdoch famously lived in unutterable domestic squalor. She was a philosopher and academic as well as a writer, in the male-dominated intellectual world of Oxford, and I don’t doubt that her refutation of domestic servitude needed to be louder and more emphatic than most people’s. In that same city, I once visited a family house at Christmastime where the woman was so distressed by the constant human encroachments on the spotless environment she maintained that when someone accidentally dislodged a few needles from the tree, we had to sit there with our feet in the air while she vacuumed them up. Such humiliations can easily be attributed to the transformation of domesticity into a modern psychical event: the suburban housewife with her Valium and her compulsive, doomed perfectionism has been the butt of a decades-long cultural joke. Yet there are other imperatives that bedevil the contemporary heirs of traditional female identity, for whom insouciance in the face of the domestic can seem a sort of political requirement, as though by ceasing to care about our homes we could prove our lack of triviality, our busyness, our equality. Some of the most exacting housekeepers I know are, in fact, men, whose sharing of the care of their children has led them down the same well-travelled road as their feminine forebears, for whom the house became an extension of the self and therefore subject to the self’s same vulnerability, neuroticism and pride. Yet these men never seem quite so trammelled or devoured by domesticity, nor so possessed by its utopian visions: it may be the last laugh of patriarchy that men are better at being women than women are; but perhaps in relinquishing the role of housewife a woman robs it of its sting, and hands over a neutered identity where a basic willingness and competence are all that’s required. She walks around with it in her flesh, that sting, the itchy consciousness of something desisted from, a possibly harmful habit that leaves an emptiness in its place, like giving up smoking and not knowing what to do with your hands.

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  Another friend of mine runs her house with admirable laxity, governing her large family by a set of principles that have tidiness as a footnote or a distant goal, something it would be nice to achieve one day, like retirement. In the kitchen, you frequently feel a distinct crunching sensation from the debris underfoot; the stairs are virtually impassable with the possessions that have accumulated there, the books and clothes and toys, the violins and satchels and football boots, all precipitously stacked as if in a vertical lost property office; the children’s rooms are so neglected they have acquired a kind of wilderness beauty, like untouched landscapes where over time the processes of growth and decay have created their own organic forms. In the kitchen, the children make volcano cakes or create chemical explosions; somewhere in the upper regions of the house, a singing teacher leads the older ones in hollering out show tunes; in the corridors, there is always a multitude of friends and pets and hangers-on milling around. One day a hamster got out of its cage; it was found six months later, living happily with a brood of offspring in a wardrobe. My friend looks at it all with mock despair, then waves it away with her hand. If that’s how they want to live, she says, then let them. In this house, the search for happiness appears to be complete; or rather, in the chaotic mountain of jumble it is always somehow at hand, the easiest of all things to find. The foreground is entirely human here: the rooms may have been neglected, but the people haven’t been. It is clear to me that by eradicating the tension of the material, my friend has been able to give her children exactly what she wanted to give them – love, authority, the right advice – where for other people these things got mixed up and snagged on one another.

  The opposing philosophies of seeming and being, when combined, create a flawed constitution whose rules, if you ever managed to follow them through, ultimately betrayed an alarming lack of logic at their core. How many times had I found myself pursuing bizarre disciplinary arguments in order to uphold domestic laws that possibly I didn’t even believe in? I often seemed to see my children looking half-pityingly at me as I railed at them for breaking something or making a mess. Is an object really more important than a person? their eyes seemed to ask. Is tidiness more important than playing? Is there really no difference between an accident – a mistake – and a calculated act of destruction?

  Yet for my own mental processes to work, the objectworld had to stay still. Objects were capable of exerting an extraordinary mute power: even Virginia Woolf writes in her diary of buying a new chest of drawers and having to leave her writing room every half-hour to go out and look at it. The photograph of the author in his book-lined study represented for me an unattainable ideal, for I would have to be on both sides of the image, creating the stage set and being its principal actor. The artist in me wanted to disdain the material world, while the woman couldn’t: in my fantasy of the orderly
writer’s room I would have to serve myself, be my own devoted housewife. It would require two identities, two consciousnesses, two sets of minutes and hours. One ‘I’ would have to clear the children’s toys from the desk so that the other ‘I’ could work. The image of the freewheeling mother with her disregard for appearances was somehow threatening from two opposing perspectives, for her apparent inferiority was in fact the reverse: she was superior to the suburban housewife in her miserable prison of immaculate surfaces, and she was superior too to me, to the modern divided woman, because her indifference to the domestic represented a form of courage. With her crunchy kitchen floor and her whirlwind-swept rooms, she was claiming the freedom of a man, or a child, or an artist, at the same time as she was asserting the superiority of her mother-love, for in overthrowing the power of objects she was simultaneously removing them as a last line of defence. Anyone could access her; there was no governed terrain to keep a person out.

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