Coventry Page 8

  The director looks sceptical. We discuss the Oresteia, in which two children, Electra and Orestes, murder – the former by encouragement and the latter by physical violence – their mother, Clytemnestra. Electra and Orestes aren’t, in fact, children. They are teenagers. They hate their mother for the fact that she has disposed of their father. They have come to resent maternal power so much that they destroy it. Instead they reverence the paternal, which is all image – their father, Agamemnon, was away fighting gloriously in Troy for most of their lives – where their mother is all actuality. They crush and disdain that actual parent in pursuit of the imagistic father whose value is recognised out in the world. Sound familiar? I ask.

  *

  A writer friend comes round. She brings her son, who is the same age as my older daughter. Once we carried these children in our arms; at other times we pushed them in buggies, or led them by the hand. Now he follows his mother in like a pet lion on a leash, a proud, taciturn beast who has consented, temporarily, to be tamed. My daughter has this same aura of the wild about her, as though beneath a veneer of sophistication she is constantly hearing the summons of her native land, somewhere formless and free that still lies inside her and to which at any moment she might return. The manners of adulthood have been recently acquired. There’s no knowing how quickly they could be discarded. She and my friend’s son greet each other in territorial monosyllables. It is as though they are two people from the same distant country who have met here in my sitting room. They’ve met before, often, but you’d never know: those were old versions of themselves, like drafts of a novel the author no longer stands by. All the same, I expect them to take themselves off elsewhere, to another room; I expect them to flee the middle-aged climate of the sitting room, but they don’t. They arrange themselves close to us, two lions resting close to the shade of their respective trees, and they watch.

  My friend and I have a few years of conversation behind us. We’ve talked about motherhood – we’ve both spent a large part of our time as single parents – and its relationship to writing. We’ve talked about the problems and pleasures of honouring reality, in life and in art. She has never upheld the shadowless account of parenthood; and, perhaps consequently, nor does she now allude to her teenage son as a kind of vandal who has ruined the lovely picture. We talk about our own teenage years, and the hostility of our parents’ generation to any form of disagreement with their children. Any system of authority based on control fears dissidence more than anything else, she says; you two don’t realise how lucky you are. The lions roll their eyes. What is being controlled, she says, is the story. By disagreeing with it, you create the illusion of victimhood in those who have the capacity to be oppressors. From outside, the dissident is the victim, but the people inside the story can’t attain that distance, for they are defending something whose relationship to truth has somewhere along the line been compromised. I don’t doubt that my parents saw themselves as my hapless victims, as many parents of adolescents do (‘You have this lovely child,’ a friend of mine said, ‘and then one day God replaces it with a monster’), but to me at the time such an idea would have been unthinkable. In disagreeing with them, I was merely trying to re-establish a relationship with truth that I thought was lost. I may even have believed that my assertions were helpful, as though we were on a journey somewhere and I was trying to point out that we had taken a wrong turn. And this, I realise, is where the feelings of powerlessness came from: disagreement only and ever drew reprisal, not for what was said but for the fact alone of saying it, as if I were telling the residents of a Carmelite convent that the building was on fire and was merely criticised for breaking the vow of silence.

  *

  In my class at school there was a girl, a sophisticated creature, clever and sharp-tongued, well dressed, worldly, mature for her age in body and mind. She spoke of her mother, with whom she lived, with extraordinary contempt. Her mother was pathetic, a housewife, a drudge. She nagged her daughter to do this or that; on occasion she overstepped the mark so far as to obstruct her in the fulfilment of her own plans and desires. Stupid cow, she would say, arriving at school. Guess what the bitch has done now? She made these remarks so often that a kind of story took root in them, with its concomitant sense of tension that would grow towards some dark climax. She would come to class with the latest instalment of the drama, and would relay the details with scathing laughter. Increasingly her own role was becoming more active, as though to show us that she was no victim, that she was about deeds as well as words. Her mother had berated her for the untidiness of her room, so she had opened her closet and, in front of her mother, carefully taken everything out and thrown it on the floor before walking out of the house to school. Her mother had made some unacceptable remark over dinner, so she got up from the table with her plate and emptied the entirety of her meal into the bin. Her open hatred of this woman mesmerised me. I was frightened of my own mother, a tense, interior fear that expressed itself in extreme self-criticism and doubt, as though she lived inside me and could see everything that went on there. I could barely see my schoolmate’s mother as a mother at all. Instead I saw her as something I could not see my own mother as: a woman, a woman in a kitchen having abuse hurled at her by this formidable child. And what I remember most clearly is that this difference – the ability to see her as a woman – enabled me to pity her.

  One day the girl came to school with a slightly wild and breathless look about her and a glint of triumph in her eye. On her way out of the house that morning, her mother had confronted her about something – I don’t remember what – and had blocked her passage down the hall to the front door, wanting an answer. She had asked her to get out of the way. The mother had refused, so her daughter had punched her in the stomach, stepped over her body where it now lay in agony on the floor and made her way out of the house.

  This, in any case, is what the girl said. An adolescent suddenly finds herself capable of breaking down the twin fortresses – verbal and physical superiority – of adult control. She can no longer be physically commandeered, be picked up or constrained; and with that defence she succeeds in wresting the story of life away from its authors, or at least in violating the principles of that story and turning them on their head. Adults can no longer touch her; she can say what she likes. When my children were small, I realise now, I routinely used my greater physical strength as a form of authority. If they wouldn’t come when I asked them to, I could simply go and pick them up. If they wouldn’t sit still, I could hold them still. It all seemed normal and innocent enough, but these days I look back on it with growing amazement. If I had never had access to that brute form of authority, I ask myself, what better authority might I have learned? If I had lacked the arms to pick them up and set them down against their will, to coerce them, would some more platonic parent–child relationship have emerged?

  I grew up in a large family where children were treated with all the sensitivity and respect of a herd of animals being corralled by a testy farmer. Respect is something I have had to learn, like French. It feels good to talk in French; the more I speak it the more I improve. But I am also more prone to make mistakes, and to criticise myself for them. When my children reached the first wild shores of adolescence, I felt distinctly the loss of old forms of control: suddenly we had moved into the subjunctive, the past historic, the conditional future. One day, having lunch with my brother, my daughter reached out to take a piece of bread before the meal. I told her to put it back – I wanted her to eat proper food, not bread – and she did, but shortly afterwards she got angry about something else and stormed away from the table. You shouldn’t have done that, he said to me. You can’t tell her not to eat bread. Would you tell a stranger sitting at the table not to eat bread? He was right: he speaks better French than I. If she’d been smaller, I realised, I’d simply have taken the bread out of her hands. But because of her age – that invisible wall that gradually rises around a person, forbidding trespass – I could n
o longer do so. However wrong or right it was, all that remained of me from that outdated version of authority were words.

  Once, visiting a friend of mine, I watched as he, too, reached the impasse of that physical authority before my eyes: sitting down to lunch, he asked his eleven-year-old daughter to remove her coat and she refused. I’m cold, she said. Take it off, he said. You can’t sit at the table in your coat. No, she said. I’m cold, I want to keep it on. He asked her again, and then again, with increasing anger. She wouldn’t budge. What was he going to do – strip the coat from her body with his own hands?

  Where once we mesmerised our children with our talk – soothing, correcting, steering, but also commanding, naming, judging, apportioning values, calling some things good and others bad, until the whole world had our language on it, a kind of graffiti – now they endeavour to shock us with theirs. We wanted to put them to sleep; they want to wake us up. Inadvertently, often well-meaningly, we fused language with action and thereby created a fundamental confusion, a confusion that is being returned to us in the form of teenagers who have realised they can exist in the space between words and deeds, a space we once denied was there.

  *

  My younger daughter attends an all-girls school. She is fourteen and has countless friends, most of them white-skinned and fair, with declarative middle-class voices and abundant shining waterfalls of hair. They move in shoals, around the streets and shops, around the park, talking and shrieking and giggling ceaselessly; their only silences are the dramatic kinds of pauses that occur in the television series they watch, silences that signify the presence somewhere nearby of a narrative event. This event, more often than not, is interpersonal, a plot twist in the politics of their friendship group, a falling-out or change of allegiance, but sometimes it takes the form of a misfortune afflicting one of their number, to whom the rest offer support with hours of murmuring discussion.

  Occasionally the shoal drifts in my direction and settles for an afternoon in my house. When my daughter was smaller and invited friends home, I knew I had to provide a narrative explanation of what the afternoon would hold. I made the world known to them by description; almost as if by describing it I created it, or at least maintained control of the narrative: I am mother, you are children, this is home, teatime, play. Sometimes I couldn’t bear the conscription of language to this phrase book of false cheer and uniformity; at other times it was soothing to be able to communicate in bland sentences that left my thoughts undisturbed. What was clear, in either case, was that these social rites were a fulcrum of storytelling, a place where a common version of things could be reiterated and agreement reached. The smallest child would know instantly if an adult said something not in the script. They themselves were learning to become scripted, saying please and thank you, answering the questions they were asked. I saw all of us, to a degree, as indoctrinated. In this sphere of universal values, I tried to keep hold of the thread of individuality, yet despite the irritants of this mass religion, the alternatives were unclear.

  But now my daughter’s friends encounter me in the kitchen, in the hall, with barely a word of greeting. They are silent; they look shiftily to the side. They move on fast, up to my daughter’s room, where the sound of talking and shrieking and giggling resumes the instant the door is closed. Quickly they forget I am there; when occasionally they emerge for reinforcements and supplies, they talk in front of me as though I am invisible. Invisibility has at least the advantage of enabling eavesdropping: I listen to them talk, gleaning knowledge of their world. They talk with striking frequency about adults, about the people they now encounter in shops and on buses, the people who serve them in cafes or sell them things. They talk, less mystified, about their teachers. They talk about their grandparents and aunts and uncles. They talk about their fathers, usually with an experimental air of equality, as if they were trying on a pair of shoes that were slightly too big for them. But most of all they talk about their mothers. Their mothers are known as ‘she’. When I first heard about ‘she’, I was slightly puzzled by her status, which was somewhere between servant and family pet. ‘She’ came in for a lot of contempt, most of it for acts of servitude and attention that she didn’t appear to realise were unwanted, like a spurned lover continuing to send flowers when the recipient’s affections have moved elsewhere. She’s such a doormat, one of them says. When I forget something I need for school, I just text her and she comes all the way across town with it. She’s so pathetic. I don’t know what Dad even sees in her. Why doesn’t she get a job or something?

  The talk of these girls brings on a distinct queasiness. I think of the many women I know who agonised over work when their children were small, who curtailed and compromised and very often gave up their careers, sometimes in the belief that it was morally correct and sometimes out of sheer exhaustion. Dad, meanwhile, is revered for his importance in the world. I hear them discuss, with what I am guessing is a degree of exaggeration, their fathers’ careers and contacts and the global impact of the work they do; unlike ‘she’, their fathers are hard-working, clever, successful, cool. They describe them as if they’d only just met them; they describe them as if they’d discovered them, despite the conspiracy to keep these amazing creatures hidden.

  When the girls go home, they leave a scene of devastation behind them. The kitchen is strewn with dirty plates and half-eaten food and empty wrappers; the bathroom is a swamp of wet towels, capsized bottles, crumpled tissues smeared with make-up. The smell of nail varnish upstairs is so strong it could knock out a horse. I tidy up, slowly. I open the windows.

  *

  Six months later, my younger daughter, I notice, has changed. She has refined her group of friends. There are fewer of them, and the ones that remain are more serious, more distinct. They go to art galleries and lectures together; on Saturdays they take long walks across London, visiting new areas. My daughter has become politicised: at dinner, she talks about feminism, current affairs, ethics. My older daughter has already made this transition, and so the two of them join forces, setting the world to rights. When they argue now, it is about the French headscarf ban in schools or the morality of communism. Sometimes it’s like having dinner on the set of Question Time. I become aware of their verbal dexterity, their information, the speed of their thought processes. Sometimes I interject, and more often than not am shot down. This, in my own teenage years, would not have been tolerated, yet I find it easy to tolerate. They’re like a pair of terriers with a stick: they’ve got their teeth into the world and its ways. Their energy, their passion, their ferocity – I regard these as the proper attributes of youth. Yet inevitably the argument overheats; one of them storms away from the table in tears, and I have to go and talk her into coming back.

  Strange as it may seem, they are still children, still having to operate bodies and minds that are like new, complex pieces of machinery. And indeed, at meal’s end, it is I who rises and clears the plates, just as I always have. It would be far too easy to jibe at the skin-depth of their feminism. Besides, I don’t see that anything has fundamentally changed in the contract between me and them. For the first time, I am glad of the flaws in our family life, though at times I have suffered bitterly over them, seeing in other people’s impeccable domestic lives a vision of stability and happiness I have absolutely failed to attain. But in this new territory, we perhaps have less to lose: no image is being defiled, no standard of perfection compromised. The traditional complaint about teenagers – that they treat the place like a hotel – has no purchase on me. In fact, I quite like the idea. A hotel is a place where you can come and go autonomously and with dignity; a place where you will not be subjected to criticism, blame or guilt; a place where you can drop your towel on the floor without fear of reprisal, but where, hopefully, over time, you become aware of the person whose job it is to pick it up and instead leave it folded neatly on a chair.

  *

  One day I go and meet my younger daughter near her school. She left an impo
rtant book at home. I suggested we meet for lunch so that I could give it to her. I arrive at the agreed-upon place and see that several of her friends are there. Let’s go somewhere else, she says, appraising the situation.

  The sun is shining. We find a cafe around the corner, a delightful, old-fashioned sort of place, nothing like the crowded chain we originally decided on. The chef, a dapper man with a brown creased head like a walnut, works in full view behind the counter, singing pleasantly to himself in a light tenor. My daughter is happy, happy in the sunshine, happy to see me. I am happy to see her, too. It is as though we have absconded together from that mild prison, home; as though we have got away from what binds us and found each other again on the other side of it, both of us free.

  She scrutinises the menu professorially and chooses a chicken salad. I say I’ll have the same thing. We talk about her schoolwork, her friends. Lately she has become so independent that watching her live is a kind of spectacle, as though she were walking a high wire with a skill I didn’t know she possessed: I watch her from below, proudly, my heart in my mouth.

  The chef is making our salads: I see him grilling the slivers of chicken, arranging the leaves, beating a dressing with a tiny silver whisk. He is so quick, so delicate. He bends absorbedly, lovingly over his creation, assembling it, tweaking it with his rapid slender fingers. Carefully, swiftly, he adds the dressing and then with a flourish rings the bell that stands on the counter beside him.

  My daughter asks me what I’ve been doing, what I’m working on, how it’s going. At home she rarely asks these questions. At home she is the subject, not I.