Nothing to Be Frightened Of (25 page)

I was once talking to a French diplomat and trying to explain my brother to him. Yes, I said, he is a professor of philosophy, who was at Oxford until the age of fifty, but now lives in the middle of France and teaches in Geneva. “The thing about him,” I went on, “is that he has an ambition—a philosophical ambition, you could say—to live nowhere. He is an anarchist, not in the narrow political sense, but in the wider philosophical one. So he lives in France, has his bank account in the Channel Islands, and teaches in Switzerland. He wants to live nowhere.” “And where does he live in France?” asked the diplomat. “The Creuse.” There was a Parisian chortle in reply. “Then he has already achieved his ambition! He lives nowhere!”

Do you have a clear enough picture of my brother? Do you need more basic facts? He is three years older than me, has been married for forty years, and has two daughters. The first complete sentence uttered by his elder daughter was “Bertrand Russell is a silly old man.” He lives in what he tells me is a
gentilhommière
(I had mistakenly called it a
maison de maître
: verbal gradations of house-type in France are as complex as those formerly applied to women of easy virtue.) He has half a dozen acres, with six llamas in a paddock: possibly the only llamas in the Creuse. His special area of philosophy is Aristotle and the pre-Socratics. He once told me, decades ago, that he had “given up embarrassment”—which makes it easier to write about him. Oh yes, and he often wears a kind of eighteenth-century costume designed for him by his younger daughter: knee breeches, stockings, buckle shoes on the lower half; brocade waistcoat, stock, long hair tied in a bow on the upper. Perhaps I should have mentioned this before.

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.