Wheels Within Wheels (25 page)

Life might have been easier for all of us had my mother allowed herself to complain openly about her sufferings. But I had no such thoughts at the time. Even after our bickering had become an almost daily event I never ceased inwardly to admire and feel proud of her stiff upper lip. There was something at once pathetic and heroic about her indestructible gaiety, her boundless enjoyment of books and music, her acute interest in politics and social problems and her indomitable dignity. It was natural that I should not think of her as an invalid, but neither did anybody else. All her life she retained her beauty and the glow of health on her cheeks. When she sat ready to receive visitors, with her chestnut hair falling in glossy waves over an embroidered silken shawl, only her motionless, unhumanly twisted hands reminded one that for half a lifetime she had been crippled. But now, behind the gallantry, the gaiety and the dignity, something was going very wrong. The tolerance and balance that had so enriched my childhood were being eroded as twenty-two years of rigorously controlled frustration took their toll.

Our domestic framework must have seemed stereotyped enough to outsiders. In Ireland daughters are traditionally expected to be
self-sacrificing
and mothers are traditionally allowed to be selfish, and families endure the consequent overt or covert hostility for barren decades. But the personalities of my mother and myself made for unusually explosive complications. I did not accept that a young adult’s only consideration should be his or her parents; and my mother, I can see now, was being demoralised by a growing realisation that her misfortune had cast a cold shadow upon my youth. Yet she knew that if she released me in the only way possible at this stage of her disease – by banishing herself permanently to a nursing home – anxious guilt about my separated parents’ misery would have made my freedom worthless. Unhappily, however, I was now incapable of
acting
– as well as feeling – humanely. When I should have been striving to hide my discontent from my mother I flaunted it, savagely, knowing that to do
so could achieve only a slight relaxation of my own tension at the expense of an increase in her suffering. Things might have been easier had she ever directly expressed some sympathy with my situation, but instead she tried to behave as though I were doing no more than my duty – and that not very well. By 1955 we were both losing our emotional grip and looking back I can see how a grim spiral developed as she sought to punish me for adding to her sufferings by exposing my own.

We had never agreed on the subject of housekeeping and it infuriated me when my mother began to try to regulate every tiny detail, though I had then been doing the job for nine years – not efficiently, I so loathed it, but adequately. This sort of thing sounds petty – even comical, in a sick sort of way – when put on paper. To me, however, it soon became a major issue. The furniture was to be waxed on Tuesdays, the silver polished on Wednesdays, the hearths blacked on Thursdays, the shopping done at this hour and the ironing at that … There was nothing intrinsically unreasonable about the general outline – probably many housewives operate such systems – but it was not
my
way of running a home. I had my own slap-dash methods which incorporated such ingenious labour-saving devices as never cleaning a soup saucepan before using it for a stew. Therefore I violently resented my mother’s humiliating post-wash-up inspections; she was treating me now as though I were a fifteen-year-old skivvy.

Yet – improbable as this may sound – we were still capable, during those two years between my Spanish tours, of genuinely enjoying each other’s company. Despite the extent to which I had long since isolated myself from my parents, mentally and emotionally, and the growing mother/daughter antagonism I have just described, our strong mutual love was still there – settled, as it were, like a sediment on the bottom of our relationship, and apparent whenever it was stirred up by something that amused us. We shared an identical sense of humour which for a time preserved what remained of our sanity. And we both instinctively recognised humour’s therapeutic value. At times we must have seemed strangely flippant for we used jokes to try to solve problems which, if taken seriously, might have brought us on to a collision course. My mother liked to quote Horace, as translated by Milton – ‘Joking decides great things / Stronger and better oft than earnest can.’ 
My return to Spain in 1956 was not the anticlimax it might have been. I postponed my holiday to September, to enjoy the grape harvest, and in many ways found this tour even more satisfying than the first. Writing a personal travel book about a country brings one very close to it, for reasons that even now I do not quite understand.

In England I had first learned to beware of generalisations about national characteristics (‘The English are so
reserved
– no one will talk to you over there!’) and in Spain this lesson was repeated. Despite the Spaniards’ reputation for excluding foreigners from their homes, I was thrice invited to stay with families to whom I was a total stranger. And though all these families – in Ronda, in a village near Valencia and in Barcelona – were either very peasant or very bourgeois, the unreasonable strait-lacedness so often associated with Spain was never apparent. The young men of the household took me sight-seeing without a chaperon and with their mothers’ approval. And their attitude towards me was neither salacious nor stilted.

On my way home I crossed the Pyrenees with twelve large bottles of Spanish brandy (bought for the equivalent of 25 pence each) rolled up in my sleeping bag and carefully roped to the carrier. This feat possibly constitutes a world record of some sort. But shortly afterwards Babieca’s back wheel buckled irreparably so the effort may not have been the economy it seemed.

I arrived home on October 6 to find that five days previously my mother had been taken to a Cork hospital suffering from severe
kidney-stones
. But Mark assured me that there was no cause for alarm; she had responded well to treatment and was due home next day. My father was staying in a boarding-house near the hospital and when I
telephoned
him that evening he had a message from my mother: I was to have the house thoroughly spring-cleaned by the time they arrived back on the following afternoon. At which point I shocked myself by wishing vehemently that it had been necessary for my mother to spend at least one more week in hospital.

Not for an instant did I consider obeying the maternal order and devoting those uniquely precious hours of freedom to housework. Instead, I went to Godfrey’s cottage for the night – the first night we had
ever spent together in seven years. Even Godfrey felt that it was not an occasion for constraint. Or perhaps he was so startled by my totally unexpected arrival that he just didn’t have time to put his
constraint-mechanism
into gear. Lying beside him after he had gone to sleep, I wondered why I did not more often ignore my mother’s less reasonable commands. Then I saw that I had been able to defy her on this point only because I was beyond reach of whatever psychic – almost hypnotic – power she had over me when we were together. And having been away, leading a normal life for five weeks, also helped. As soon as I was back into the rhythm of the treadmill I would again become impotent to assert myself. For a mad moment I thought of cycling away in the morning to take a boat to England and there finding a job – any job – and freedom. But of course it would not be freedom. While my mother lived I could nowhere find freedom.

Loyalty prevented me from discussing the sordid details of our family life with anyone but Mark. Even to Godfrey I would not admit how difficult my mother made things, though it was impossible to conceal the fact that I was living under an increasing strain. Besides, he had enough problems and tensions of his own without being expected to participate in mine. And it was good for me to forget the domestic scene, in so far as I could, while we were together.

Cycling home over the heathery Vee early next morning, through crisp, bright autumn light, I wondered – ‘When will I again be able to enjoy the mountains in the morning?’ Then my heart seemed to twist in my chest with angry despair. For years – probably – to come I would be housebound at all times, apart from my four-hour evening break, and throughout the winter months ahead I would never be out-
of-doors
in daylight. This deprivation I felt more acutely and continuously than any other. It truly was a form of mental torture, to be denied the most simple, and yet for me most exhilarating pleasure of roaming the countryside in all weathers, during all seasons and at all hours of the day and night. I realised then – free-wheeling down towards the silver serpent of mist that marked the Blackwater – how little emotional stamina I had left. After my earlier tours I had for a few months felt cheerfully equal to anything. But this time it was not so.

The doctors had advised my mother to maintain a regular daily intake of four pints of home-made barley-water and this gave her a semi-valid excuse for making still greater demands on me; soon my off-duty hours had been reduced to three. Hitherto my father’s nursing had been acceptable in a crisis, but by the end of that year my mother had decreed that only I could cope effectively. Mark tersely condemned this as a form of moral blackmail. Yet even at the time I – perhaps unfortunately – could see the invalid’s point of view. Apart from the kidney-stones, which caused considerable extra pain and discomfort, her arthritis had recently entered a new phase. She was no longer able to write, or to feed herself, and turning the pages of a book demanded much dogged patience. To make her comfortable in bed or bath chair required a combination of skill, strength and gentleness that I, after a decade of almost daily practice, naturally possessed to a greater degree than anyone else. We formed a perfect team and mine was the only touch she did not dread. Indeed, she was hardly aware of it, so smooth was our
teamwork
, and we often became absorbed in a wireless concert while going through the daily routine of washing and dressing. But the very ease with which I could accomplish these tasks – every day of the week, every week of the month, every month of the year – increased their suffocating monotony. As a civilised human being I should have rejoiced at my ability to ease my mother’s burden. But I detested nursing even more than housekeeping – and detested myself for being so devoid of proper feeling – and then I came to detest my mother because her physical helplessness gave her such power over me. Undeniably she abused that power, as Mark said. But had my own attitudes and reactions been less barbarous she might not have done so – or at least not to the same extent. Yet now I can reproach neither of us for our behaviour. Even at the time I had frequent brief moments of total detachment when I seemed to be observing the Murphys, as a family, from outside. Then I saw that we were all equally to be pitied and that none of us was to be blamed. We were enmeshed in a hideous, unbreakable net, each having to play a part that denied his or her nature, each knowing that to struggle was futile and yet each incapable of not struggling.

The most astonishing thing about this period is how much I continued to enjoy life. My desperate or resentful moods became more frequent 
but were always brief. Human beings can adapt to almost anything and, though my adaptability was eventually to be overstrained, there was no day when I did not revel simply in existing. All my life I had felt grateful (to whom I knew not) for the gift of existence, and I felt no less so now. I discovered that one does not have to be happy, successful or fulfilled to enjoy living. Even the bitterest despair and frustration can at a deep level be relished as part of the human experience. And so is generated a basic content which survives the surface discontents provoked by everyday miseries. Thus I was for a long time fundamentally resigned to my situation; I could not otherwise have borne it. I had none of the supports that would have been available to a devout Christian yet I sensed a certain symmetry in the background. I believed, confusedly yet firmly, that Fate organises things constructively and that in some obscure way what now seemed so wrong and arid would be proved right and fruitful.

On a different (or perhaps not so different) level I had, for my weakest moments, an absurd little consolation which I mentioned not even to Mark. Although I have never been superstitious I could not help being comforted by my mother’s story of a Romany woman she had met in Somerset when she was nineteen, before she knew my father. This gypsy foretold that she would marry a small, slim, dark man, and move away from her birthplace to live among many trees, and endure a very long illness – and have only one child, a daughter who would be famous. Every prediction but the last had by now come true. And though I did not in the least want to be famous, I hoped – and in my heart believed – that this fortune-teller’s blanket-term covered authorship. 

During the winter of 1956-57 the rapid and conclusive disintegration of our house coincided with the maturing of my father’s life insurance policy; so we decided to build a bungalow on the outskirts of Lismore. North, the site overlooked the Blackwater valley where wooded ridges rise from the river to the foot of the mountains: south, it overlooked placid fields, bounded by fine old trees, and against the sky lay another wooded ridge, the watershed between the valleys of the Bride and the Blackwater. We were within five minutes’ brisk walk of the town yet only one other building was in sight – the farm at the end of the long field that sloped down behind us to the river.

Significantly, our building activities temporarily improved the domestic atmosphere. My mother, who had architecture in her blood, designed the house herself with the aid of a local engineer. And, having found this outlet for her energies and talents, she became much easier to deal with. We drew closer than we had been for years as we discussed
colour-schemes
, floorings and cupboard spaces.

The decision to build delighted me. I had no grudge against the ruin that had been my home for as long as I could remember, but to own a house in Lismore would confirm my sense of belonging to the
Blackwater
valley. I visited the site often and, wandering through the embryonic rooms, wondered to what events they would form the background during the next half-century or so. I felt quite sure that here was my home for the rest of my life and this certainty was soothing.

On August 31, 1957, my father paid the last instalment of the builder’s bill and next day we moved in. It was characteristic of my parents that the house did not seem very modern by contemporary standards. (Now it is often mistaken for a’30s dwelling.) Money was severely limited and all the emphasis was on sound basic materials. Not a shilling was left over for frills and to this day the pine floors remain uncarpeted. But in twenty years the place has needed no structural repairs and it seems unlikely to do so within my lifetime.

Our new house brought about a providential widening of my tiny social circle. While it was being built a mutual acquaintance had introduced me to an English couple who for ten years had been farming near Lismore. I found the Pearces unusually congenial but, though their invitation to call any time was plainly sincere, I felt diffident about accepting it. (My restricted life had left me a very gauche twenty-
five-year
old.) However, I eventually decided to use our move as an excuse to meet them again. They came to a house-warming supper, were
introduced
to my parents and asked me back. This time I readily accepted; I had by then realised that the Pearces were – on more than one count – in a somewhat similar situation to the Murphys. Like ourselves, they lacked an obvious social niche in West Waterford. Neither came of farming stock; Brian’s father had been a business man, Daphne’s an Anglican clergyman. And though they were on excellent terms with the
neighbourhood
, and had many friends in various parts of Ireland, they had found nobody on their own wavelength in the Lismore area. This lack was more constricting for Daphne than for Brian. He, as an indefatigable member of the National Farmers’ Association, had for years been well integrated with the local community.  

Daphne’s interests and skills ranged from stock-breeding – at which she was outstandingly successful – to painting, literature and philosophy. She was a most unlikely person to be found farming on a remote Irish hillside and she clearly considered me an equally unlikely person to be found living in a bungalow outside Lismore. We needed each other and within a month of that supper party I was visiting the Pearces twice a week. There was no gradual process of assimilation; I had at once become a member of the family.  

The Pearces, with their two children aged fifteen and five, provided a substitute for the normal family life I had never known. Yet the Pearce family could be described as normal only in contrast to the Murphy household’s painfully distorted affections. I had suspected, when we first met, that they too had their problems and soon I was as immersed in those as the Pearces were in mine. For all concerned, this diversification of tensions and worries was helpful and we supported each other equally during the next gruelling year.  

Daphne – my first woman friend – had entered my life at such an
appropriate time that our meeting might have been stage-managed by some amiable angel. On one level we seemed to have known each other for a lifetime, so quickly did we become close. Yet, as a fresh observer of the Murphy scene, Daphne was able to provide objective insights and down-to-earth advice such as neither Mark nor Godfrey was capable of, both having been too close to my problems for too long.

During 1958 I needed every sort of moral support I could get. By Easter I had begun to worry about Godfrey’s worsening smoker’s cough and new irritability. But when I suggested a check-up he assured me most persuasively that he felt perfectly fit and I stopped worrying – consciously.

Meanwhile things had become almost intolerable at home. Since the onset of my mother’s kidney complaint in 1956 I had not had one unbroken night’s sleep. Every night I was roused once, in the small hours – and often twice, and sometimes thrice. Each break kept me up for at least an hour of torturing drowsiness and it was not possible for me to lie on in the morning because by seven-thirty my mother would once more need the bedpan.

My father, who slept on a folding divan bed in my mother’s room, was also disturbed every night – needlessly – and the obvious solution was for me to give up my bedroom to him. No logical argument could be opposed to this move, yet for me it represented the erosion of the last fragment of my liberty. I had never, except at school, had to share a bedroom with anyone and the effect of this apparently trivial change in our domestic arrangements was devastating. Until then, nights had been a time of unwinding, despite the strain of being regularly awakened out of a deep sleep. If too overwrought to sleep, I could read, or write letters, into the small hours. (My concentration had been so diminished by lack of sleep that I had given up attempting to write anything more than letters.) Above all I could feel that I was
myself
, in the solitude of my personal refuge. At the end of the day I needed, desperately, to be alone, having spent so many fraught hours in the dank shadow of my mother’s inner disintegration. I often felt utterly unnerved by what then looked to me like a complete personality change though I now see it as a mere shift of emphasis. Under the pressure of steadily deteriorating health, certain traits which had always been present, but 
either suppressed or used constructively, were now being released and used destructively.

Mark urged me not to give up my bedroom, however unreasonable my attitude might seem, and to refuse to attend to my mother at night – thus forcing her either to reduce her barley-water intake in the evenings or to employ a night nurse. He argued that already I was near
breaking-point
and that for everybody’s sake I should refuse to be bullied. Even from him I resented the use of ‘bullied’ in relation to my mother’s behaviour. Yet it was justified, though her methods were so subtle that they went undetected by me.

I longed to take Mark’s advice but was incapable of doing so. This was partly because my mother would have made me feel so guilty had I defied her, and partly because retaining my own room would have been so unfair on my father. Thus I allowed a routine to become established that almost destroyed me. I could no longer read in bed – or between chores, because my mother kept me so busy all day. Only by the exercise of considerable ingenuity could I get through a few chapters while preparing vegetables or washing clothes or polishing silver. (When up against it one discovers how much can be accomplished ‘blind’.) Worst of all – because I had become so dependent on comforting visits from my friends – my mother developed a virulent, jealous hatred of those who were closest to me. Within five minutes, at most, of my receiving Mark or Daphne or Brian, she would summon me and demand elaborate attentions calculated to last longer than my visitor could wait. Occasionally her need was genuine, but usually it was simulated – and I knew this. Yet I could not fully accept my friends’ verdict: that now her illness was not only physical. The rational part of me assented, but to act on the basis of this fact was impossible. Emotionally I resisted the thought of my mother’s
mind
being diseased, though had I been able to think clearly I would have seen that the choice lay between this and a much more terrible form of spiritual corruption. So I persisted in treating her as an antagonist rather than as a patient – which proves that during those years I, too, was mentally unsound.

My mother and I were the most obvious victims of the Murphy situation, but my father must have suffered as much as either of us. While we went our tormented, obsessive ways, at least deriving some
perverse relief from being active in our campaign of mutual destruction, he was a helpless, passive, sane observer, pitying us both yet unable directly to help either of us in our relationship with the other. Of course he was still helping my mother in other ways and indirectly he did help me, for I was aware of his unspoken sympathy. Our persisting inability to communicate and his loyalty to my mother prevented him from voicing this sympathy. But the older I grew the more pronounced became our strange, telepathic understanding – defying years of estrangement with the knowledge that blood has of blood.

This estrangement was now brought into my feud with my mother. For years she had accepted it sadly and tactfully, but from 1958 onwards she contemptuously upbraided me, almost every day, for my seeming indifference and ingratitude towards her beloved husband. My friends blamed my father for not intervening to free me from the maternal grip and when goaded beyond reason and justice I, too, used to condemn his pusillanimity. But this was unfair. My father, who had his own sort of moral courage and endurance, had always lacked decisiveness in his relationship with his wife. This had helped, in the past, to make their marriage the improbable success that it was; now it meant that he was no less trapped than myself. For him to appear to ‘take my side’ would have seemed a betrayal to my mother – though ultimately it would have been of as much benefit to her as to me – and like myself he was paralysed, at this stage, by misplaced compassion.

In my memory, August will always be the month most closely associated with Godfrey. In August 1949 we first drove to Goat Island, in August 1952 we first made love – and in August 1958 he told me that at last he was going to Peru. I did not believe him. For years he had been planning to explore Inca sites – archaeology was his subject – ‘When I feel better about things.’ This meant when he had overcome his self-consciousness about his appearance; and I had noticed no recent improvement in that respect. We looked at each other in silence. And for an instant – it was a weird time-shift, not at all like a memory – I seemed to be back by Bayl Lough on the day when he had first looked at me with love. I knew that he knew that I did not believe him. I moved away, across the room. My heart was pounding with fear and I was shaking all over, uncontrollably.
Then my fear was displaced by a desolating grief because he would not confide in me. I felt reduced again to the status of his young friend – the child whom he had to protect. Or was he protecting himself? In any case I would play it his way – as I always had. I left him ten minutes later, an hour earlier than necessary. We said goodbye casually at the gate, in full view of Jock, his manservant.

I can recall almost nothing of the next four and a half months. From London Godfrey wrote stiltedly to say that he had decided to spend some time there, bringing himself up to date on recent archaeological discoveries in Peru. He expected to be very busy, and not to have much time for letter writing. I think I tried at this point to persuade myself that he was telling the truth. But when there was no Christmas letter I came back to reality.

On January 3, 1959, Jock appeared at the back door as I was straining my mother’s barley-water in the scullery. He had never before been to our house and he did not have to say anything. He gave me a small parcel, containing a letter and diaries, and explained that Godfrey had wished to be buried at sea. Neither of us showed any emotion. I did not encourage him to linger, but I felt that he understood. He, too, was a good friend.

As I carried the tray into my mother’s room I felt – for the first and so far only time in my life – that I was about to faint. On the wireless Beethoven’s Fifth had just begun. I put the tray by the bed and sat in an armchair out of sight of my mother. Then a curious thing happened. As I listened I could feel strength returning, and not only physical strength. This was one of the strangest experiences of my life: it is virtually impossible to describe. Physically I could
feel
the music surging through me, recharging me with every sort of energy. By the end I was completely composed and capable of continuing with the day’s routine as though nothing had happened. But this was only a surface composure. Inwardly I had taken the penultimate step towards a complete mental breakdown.

Again, my memory retains few details about the appalling months that followed. Almost the only thing I can distinctly recollect is picking up a heavy chair and flinging it across my mother’s room in a paroxysm of frustrated rage. Then, one July morning, I resolved to leave home for 
good. I cannot recall my particular ‘last straw’ incident. I only remember standing outside the back door, beside my loaded bicycle, and saying goodbye to my father. ‘I’m not coming back,’ I told him. He looked at me with despair in his eyes but said nothing.

Did I then believe my own words? Later it transpired that for a year or so I had been living in a fantasy world, a grim extension of the happy imaginings of childhood. Between September and December 1958 I had forged, to myself, letters from Godfrey at the rate of about two a week – and had shown them to the Pearces. Towards the end of this period, I had also forged letters from Godfrey to Brian and Daphne. And I had reported to them that Jock frequently called at Clairvaux with news of Godfrey – though at that time Jock was also in London and never once visited Ireland. Moreover, I invented friends of Godfrey who arranged secret rendezvous with me in the County Library when it was empty in the evenings. I have no recollection of all this, but long afterwards, when I had regained my balance, Daphne described to me my frantic fantasies. She also admitted that during this period, when she was driving towards Clairvaux to visit me, her predominant emotion was fear lest she might find that at last I had physically attacked my mother.