Coventry Read online

  I notice one day that my daughter is spending less time with her adopted household. When I ask her about it, she admits that her friend started to comment on her frequent presence there. I feel for her: the provisional home, the home that you are never quite entitled to remain in, is something with which I am familiar. At her age, on Sunday evenings, I had to leave the warmth of the house and be driven through the rain to the train station to go back to boarding school. I wanted only to be allowed to stay where I was; all weekend, the feeling of Sunday evening’s approach was as cruel and meticulous as the ticking of a time bomb. The school week had the same cruelty in reverse, as I waited for time to pass the other way and allow me to go home again. Part of the restlessness and anxiety I feel at home has, I realise, to do with time: I am forever waiting, as though home is a provisional situation that at some point will end. I am looking for that ending, that resolution, looking for it in domestic work as I look for the end of a novel by writing. At home I hardly ever sit down: the new sofa has nothing to fear from me. For me, home is not a feeling; it’s an image, an idea, a goal, perhaps as it was for my mother, except that – as with so many lost or bankrupt identities – it has filtered down to me as an often inchoate set of tics and compulsions. In their rooms, my daughters drop their clothes on the floor, as though to reassure anyone watching that this history ends with them.

  If home was my mother’s novel, then we were its created characters, essential but unfree. By contrast I am just a cleaner, a cook, a disgruntled odd-job man: my daughters create themselves. I have tried so hard not to rule them from the baleful matriarchal domestic throne – not to make an awful kind of power out of powerlessness – that I sometimes wonder whether I have done something much worse, which is make myself of no importance. I have played down the domestic work I do as if it were something contagious I don’t want them to catch. I have suggested to them that motherhood is a mere scaffolding, a temporary arrangement, like the casing that falls away when the rocket lifts itself from the earth and begins its journey to the moon. After dinner I immediately get up to clear the plates away, and they put out their hands to stop me. Can’t we just stay like this for a while? they say.

  *

  I have made an unlikely friend, the wife of a long-ago boyfriend. They invite me to their flat for supper; it is on the fourth floor, at the top of a long, winding staircase. The views are spectacular from inside, and we eat by the window, around their small modern table. At some point during the evening, they ask me if I remember another table, a table I and her husband apparently bought when for a time we shared the flat together. I left that flat – one of many homes I have left – more or less with the clothes I stood up in, too guilty and ashamed to want to take anything with me. The table, along with other things we bought, remained where it was. It was a vast, dark thing made from an enormous slab of wood with a strange carved surface: the top had in fact been the door to a Chinese monastery, and it was mounted on thick dark legs. We bought this gigantic curio from an antiques shop, presumably with the idea of having large dinner parties around it, and though I can’t remember those dinners my recollection of the table is entirely clear. It remained in my ex-boyfriend’s possession and was still there, in the flat where we now sit, when his wife came on the scene.

  Young and jealous then, she set about removing every trace of my existence from what was to become her home. Some of it was easily got rid of; other things – a sofa, a mahogany chest of drawers, a brass bed whose headboard and footboard weighed a ton – required the assistance of removal men. In my abandonment of these things, she perceived some exercise of freedom that she refused to underwrite: if I was going to go, then the whole material world I had created was going to go, too; I couldn’t just act as if I were invisible and then leave other people to deal with the concrete facts. The table was the biggest and weightiest of these facts: it was ten or more feet long by four across, and several inches thick; she didn’t know how it had ever come up four flights of stairs in the first place. She took a photograph of it and advertised it for sale in the local paper, and before long a young woman phoned wanting to buy it. My friend was at pains to tell her she would need to bring people to help collect it, but the young woman blithely assured her that her boyfriend would probably be around. My friend repeated her injunction that it was a job for several men. It’ll be fine, said the young woman, stop worrying.

  The evening of the collection arrived. My friend’s husband, my ex-boyfriend, had gone away for a week for work, so my friend was alone; it was midwinter and unusually cold. Soon after dark it started to snow, and by the time the young woman rang the bell there was a full-blown blizzard outside. When my friend opened the door and saw the woman standing there unaccompanied – her boyfriend was busy, apparently – she began to despair. The woman – girl, really – was physically tiny, not to mention inappropriately dressed for the task of extracting this colossal incubus, this ten-ton Minotaur, from the fourth floor. Two men happened to be passing on the snowy pavement, and in desperation my friend asked whether they would mind lending a hand; meanwhile the girl had taken out her mobile phone and was tapping at it with varnished fingernails, a process that resulted in a further man arriving shortly afterwards. The team ascended the winding staircase to the flat. The three men could barely lift the tabletop: it was obvious everyone would have to help. My friend rolled up her sleeves, preparing to assist at this great expulsion, like a midwife at a birth. They managed to get it out on to the landing, but it was too large to fit around the corner of the stairs. For an hour or so they manoeuvred it this way and that, but it wouldn’t go. Panting, the men began to shake their heads, saying it wasn’t going to work. They were ready, it was clear, to give up. But how had the table got there in the first place, if it couldn’t come out again? This idea, that I had left behind me something that had grown and impacted itself, something that could never be removed, an inoperable tumour in the heart of her home – inexplicable though it was – galvanised my friend into a state of near-frenzy. Through sheer force of will she held the men to the task. Someone suggested that rather than trying to go round the corners, they lower the table straight down through the gap between the banisters. The drop was some fifty feet; the group formed a sort of human chain, half remaining above to lower the table and half standing below at each level to receive it. At one point the gap between the banisters widened and it was hard for the group below to get a firm hold; my friend, looking down at the scene as though from a great distance, dimly realised that if they lost hold of the table it was entirely possible someone would be killed. The men were panting and sweating; the tiny girl stood helplessly by, saying, ‘Oh, my God’ repeatedly. But my friend did not desist; this battle, the battle to drive me out of her territory, was one she was determined to win. With a last excruciating effort the table was lowered to ground level. Breathless and drenched in sweat, my friend walked slowly to the front door and opened it on to the dark, snowy night. The men carried the table out into the white world, and the girl followed them, while my friend remained in the doorway. They were chatting now like old friends; she heard them agreeing to go and have a drink at the pub once they’d put the table in the van. My friend stayed where she was, watching them as they slowly processed away with their dark burden down the pavement through the snow, the sound of their talk and laughter fading while their image remained; an image that reminded her strangely of a funeral procession, the coffin being borne away, the weight of our material evidence being carried out of this life, on the strong shoulders of the pallbearers.

  *

  I go to the Lake District for a few days on a walking holiday. In the sunshine on the top of Scafell Pike, my phone rings. It’s my sister: she has called to tell me that one of my daughters has had a party at the flat in my absence. More than a hundred people turned up; the disturbance was such that the police were called. I ask if there’s been much damage, and there’s a long silence before I get a reply.

  When I call
my daughter, my hands shaking in anger so that I can barely hold my phone, I find myself repeating the same phrases over and over. It’s a farce, I keep saying. It’s all just a farce. Later I realise that what I was trying to express was the pain of discovering that my narrative of home had been – or so it felt – mocked and rejected. But it does not escape me that the reverse might just as easily be true. To use something, even wrongly, does not have to imply contempt; it might in fact imply belief, belief in the reality of this fabrication, home.

  When I get back, I open the door expecting to be hit by the smell of stale alcohol and smoke, but in fact what I smell are flowers. It is a sunny day, and the whole flat is filled with them, roses and irises and hyacinths and daffodils spilling out of every vase and jug that could be found in the cupboards. My daughter has cleaned up; the flowers are her apology. On the journey back, I brooded on the probability that I would never feel quite the same about the home I had created, for while I knew a hundred teenagers had conducted a bacchanal there, the fact that I didn’t witness it seemed to create an unbreachable dissociation, a feeling of separation that I was surprised to discover caused me a degree of relief.

  I put my bag on the counter and smell the flowers, one after another. I walk from room to room, looking around me like a visitor.

  Lions on Leashes

  When my two daughters became teenagers, something happened that was unique in my experience of parenting so far: other people began to warn me how awful it would be. Until then, the story of family life that I heard from my contemporaries had been one of relentless – almost frantic – positivism, a bright picture from which shadows were meticulously absent, as though they had been carefully excised. I had struggled to believe in that story, which often seemed to invoke a version of childhood composed of adult fantasies, fantasies so powerful that they threatened to undermine reality itself – a Walt Disney world where wish fulfilment had become a moral good yet whose ultimate desire was to obscure the truth. In my own experience, truth had stubbornly continued to insist on itself: the difficulties of continuing to create while bringing up two small children, the conflict between artistic and familial identity, the attempt to pursue your own truth while still honouring the truth of others, the practical and emotional complexities of motherhood and recently of divorce and single parenthood – all these tensions were real, so real that sometimes their causes were difficult to locate. At such times I learned to recognise the good by its proximity to the bad and vice versa; light and shadow couldn’t be separated, for the reason that they defined each other. Yet the public narrative of parenthood denied the light and shadow of reality; it veered insistently, sometimes crazily, towards joy. Sometimes it simply sounded like people trying to bridge the gap – for themselves, as much as for others – between the image and the truth, a gap that is nowhere deeper or more mysterious than in the experience of having a child. But at other times it sounded more like something nobler, something I lacked the knowledge of, a kind of courage or self-restraint that was interwoven with the responsibility of parenthood; a form of election, like knighthood, that brought with it a distinct code of conduct.

  Except that suddenly it didn’t any more. When people asked me how old my daughters were, they would grimace at my reply. Poor you, they’d say, or, Good luck, or, at best, Don’t worry, it’ll pass, you’ll get them back eventually. Stories began to emerge in my circle of acquaintances, of shouting and slammed doors and verbal abuse, of academic failure, of secrecy and dishonesty; and of darker things, of eating disorders, self-harm, sexual precocity and depression. They used to be so sweet, a friend of mine said of his daughter and son, shaking his head. I don’t know what happened. It’s like a nightmare. Another friend says, It’s as if they hate me. I walk into a room and they wince; I speak and they ball up with irritation. I’m being bullied, she says, reminding me of Raymond Carver’s disturbing poem, ‘On an Old Photograph of My Son’, an outpouring of the author’s feelings of victimisation at the hands of his adolescent son, his anger at the waste of his own youth and energy the nurture of this ‘petty tyrant’ represents. Carver was an artist, and no cheerleader for family life, but perhaps all parents feel an element of artistry in their creation of a child. To be an artist is to have your creation obey you, but as Carver points out, parenthood is the opposite of art: the created object – the child – can become instead an uncontrollable source of destructiveness.

  *

  Adolescence, it strikes me, shares some of the generic qualities of divorce. The central shock of divorce lies in its bifurcation of the agreed-upon version of life: there are now two versions, mutually hostile, each of whose narrative aim is to discredit the other. Until adolescence, parents by and large control the family story. The children are the subject of this story, sure enough, the generators of its interest or charm, but they remain, as it were, characters, creatures derived from life who nonetheless have their being in the author’s head. A large part of parental authority is invested in the maintenance and upkeep of this story, its repetition, its continued iterations and adaptations. And it feels right to tell it, for what we are offering our children is a story of life in which they have been given a role. How true is it? It’s hard to tell. In a story there’s always someone who owns the truth: what matters is that character’s ability to serve it. But it is perhaps unwise to treasure this story too closely or believe in it too much, for at some point the growing child will pick it up and turn it over in his hands like some dispassionate reviewer composing a cold-hearted analysis of an overhyped novel. The shock of critique is the first, faint sign of the coming conflict, though I wonder how much of what we call conflict is in fact our own deserved punishment for telling the story wrong, for twisting it with our own vanity or wishful thinking, for failing to honour the truth.

  My daughters tell me tales of how this conflict is playing out on the other side, in their world. One friend’s mother is so fearful for and overprotective of her daughter – an only child – that she won’t let her go by train with a group of her friends for a day out; the daughter must remain at home while the others enjoy themselves. Another friend’s parents have no idea that their son is a regular and increasingly chronic drug user; they adhere to the happy, sunlit story of family life, while his friends grow more and more anxious on his behalf. Another is subjected to severe and often bizarre penalties and punishments for the minutest failure to achieve excellence in her moral, academic and personal life. Her parents are Catholics, my daughter adds, as though that explained everything.

  Because they’re told by my daughters, these stories have the teenagers as their protagonists. The stories told by my peers work the other way around. One woman’s son texts her abusive messages from his bedroom while she stands cooking in the kitchen below; another’s children have defected to live with their father, despite their mother’s tireless generosity and care, because he allows them unrestricted access to their phones and laptops; the son of a friend has a party at the family home that results in hundreds of pounds’ worth of damage; another’s daughter won’t invite friends home or allow her parents to pick her up from school because she is ashamed of the family’s modest house and car.

  I find that I naturally side with the protagonists in my daughters’ stories and against the narrators of my friends’. My own memories of adolescence remain the most potent I have. That self is still more real to me than any other I have inhabited. As a thirteen-year-old, I felt both powerless within, and outraged by, the adult world. I was characterised as the family firebrand, the difficult one – but increasingly I find myself recollecting the powerlessness. It is possible, I have discovered, to attribute an inordinate power to your children. But in fact the only power they have is that which lies in the mere fact of existence. They exist: it is from what their existence means for us that the chimera of their power is generated.

  *

  I’m currently writing a version of Euripides’ Medea for a theatre in London. The director and I
have an ongoing difference of opinion. The play is notorious for its representation of a woman who kills her two young children; that is what most people know about it, without necessarily being aware of how or why she does so. At its most reductive, Medea is the archetype of the ‘bad mother’; vaguely, she has become associated with the concept of maternal ambivalence, in which women’s suppressed hatred for and resentment of their offspring is seen as the counterweight to their enactment of ‘perfect’ motherhood. There is a kind of cultural hysteria around maternal ambivalence that I dislike, for the reason that it takes something subtle and interesting – the mixed feelings of motherhood – and turns it into something blatant and grotesque. The idea that the woman who explores those feelings sits at one end of a trajectory that has child murder at its other is ridiculous. And besides, Medea doesn’t kill her children because she dislikes them or finds them irritating. She kills them because her husband has abandoned both her and them for someone young, beautiful and rich. She refuses to be made such use of. She refuses to let him get away with it.

  I find that I do not believe in the child-killing as a literal event. But the director cannot conceive of a Medea in which the children are not killed. Around this impasse we have arranged ourselves. I say, Ours is a world in which psychological and actual violence have become mutually distinct. The killing no longer means what it once might have. Actual violence is rudimentary and mute; psychological violence is complex and articulate. He says, The play’s violence is both metaphor and reality. The two, in other words, meet and mingle, as in the world of Greek mythology, where the gods met and mingled with humans. I say, That metaphor is lost on our literal-minded society; instead the play is regarded as a ‘problem play’ – but the problem of women murdering their children is not a problem we actually have. Even as metaphor. In fact, if anything, it’s the other way around. Metaphorically or otherwise, women don’t murder their children. It’s the children who murder their mothers.