three children. The first time I walked through her back door I was taken aback by the poverty. In the small kitchen was a dirty stove, upon which stood a large chip pan. A vague smell of old chip fat and unwashed clothes lingered. Outside, the garden was a turmoil of broken toys, old bikes and junk. An apple tree stood in its centre, still alive, blossoming.
‘Want some apples?’ said her younger son to me.
‘There aren’t any,’ I replied.
‘Smart mush!’
In the dining room stood a couple of chairs and a solid table strewn with old copies of the local newspaper. An ash tray was pushed to the edge, brimming with cigarette butts and ash. It was perilously close to falling off. The wallpaper was peeling and torn; threadbare rugs partially covered the grey linoleum floor. When C came into the room I smiled and said hello and she said, ‘Ah! Hello.’
I had spoken to C once or twice before. She was in her late forties. Her hair was greying and messy. She had a snub nose and wore glasses. She dressed in whatever clothes came her way, which gave her an unconventional appearance. She was outspoken. I wasn’t sure what to make of her at first. She was old enough to be my mother, and in a way, as we became close friends, she became a mother in my new life, a mentor. We would spend hours in conversation. We went out together. People wondered, but there was nothing sexual between us. She was a link between my two lives, a transition out of my past, and she helped me to secure the emotional roots of my independence.
I moved away five years later and didn’t see C again until I had a phone call from her elder son, who told me she had cancer. It was 1990, and I hadn’t been back for ten years. I arranged to travel down two days later. The house was much as I remembered it, but the poverty had gone. There were carpets on all the floors, lamp shades and new curtains and the walls had been repainted. A new three-piece suite surrounded one of those gas fires with fake coal in the grate. C was sitting in an armchair with a blanket over her knees. Her face was drawn and she had lost a lot of weight. There was a faint bluish tinge around the edges of her lips and dark rings around her eyes. She looked very tired.
Her elder son had collected me from the station and then left us to go and shop. I sat on the sofa. C looked at me with some of the old familiarity. She seemed almost like a stranger to me. She told me about her children: her younger son was a labourer; her daughter was married; her elder son was thinking of leaving for London – there was no work in the area. Then she said to me, ‘The first time I saw you I knew why you had come here. You were so serious.’ I didn’t say anything. My seriousness had been frequently remarked on by my mother and I resented it. C told me,
My father was an accountant in Manchester. We were quite a well-off family. But I married beneath myself, as they say. My husband was a seaman. I fell for his charm and his sense of adventure. I longed to escape from home and who better than a sailor to do it with. We made plans to go to Canada. I got a passport. He was going to get me aboard his ship. We would sail into the sunset. I was only nineteen and very romantic, very naive. I thought I would never see my family again, but I didn’t care; it seemed worth it.
He got his papers and we travelled down here. It was our first port of call, he said, on the long voyage to a new life. He could sound romantic too. We married and a week later he embarked and left me here. I had to keep at least one part of the dream alive so I never went back home. I don’t think he ever had any intention of taking me to Canada. I became pregnant and we eventually got this house. A couple of years later he lost his job and began to drink. He became violent. I had three kids and I was at my wits’ end. I got an injunction and he left. I heard he was working the boats. I never saw him again.
I saw C one last time, when she was in hospital. She had been haemorrhaging and the doctors believed she had only days to live. She told me about her plans to find a small flat. She wanted to be on her own and lead her own life. I nodded my agreement. She repeated that she had always wanted a place of her own. Her elder son had contacted the council and thought they might have found somewhere for her. When I left I held her hand briefly, but she didn’t want to say goodbye, to acknowledge that we might not see each other again. On the train home I watched the countryside pass in a swirl of green. We entered a tunnel and the lights in the train flickered and cut out. For an instant it was dark and there was nothing to do except touch the cold, dark glass of the window. And then the daylight came, and then a hedgerow and, beyond it, fields. There is never a new beginning, only the muddle of the past and the never quite graspable present. C died a month later. She was found by her daughter. She had collapsed in the kitchen of her new flat, and died alone.
I understood what C had meant about my arrival at her home all those years ago. Like her I had wanted to disown my past. My seriousness had reflected an anxiety that my need for my family would threaten my autonomy. My face would become fixed in earnest concentration as I sought to banish the threatening feelings of dependency. In boyhood, being alone had been something to fear; in adulthood it became a virtue. I bolstered my defences with absolutes, intolerance of compromises and ambiguities. As I grew older I had imagined that at some time in my future, when my own desire was no longer compromised by my need for my mother and my family, I would become myself, and be completely present in my own mind and desire. The illusion of male adolescence is that we can become our idealized fathers, escape our mothers and our need. I now know this is impossible. To imagine that one has escaped from dependency on others is illusory. It is to become enclosed in a self-made emptiness. What was Kerouac’s pearl in the end but the terror of his own aloneness, which he could never alleviate because he dreaded his own need of women? His answer was to keep moving. At the end of the road there was nowhere for him to go but back to his childhood home, and no one to be with but his mother. All that journeying, and he ended up where he had begun.
This morning I was alone in my house and I decided to go out for a walk. As I stepped out of the front door the rain began and stopped me. I retreated inside my doorway. The rain became heavier, large drops darkening the dried pavement, gliding down the dusty windows. It began to drum on the ground, pummelling the fragile plants in the window boxes. The woman and her two children from across the road hurried in through their front door. The shopping she carried caught between the children and for a moment they were brought to a halt until she yanked the bags free. The door closed. A car passed. In this unexpected instant activity came to a standstill, and people were cocooned inside their own lives. A second car passed, but more slowly, its tyres swooshing in the water. The rain began to slant into the doorway. For a little while longer I stood watching it. Then I turned back into my house and closed the door. It was a moment in time when there was nowhere to go and nothing to do.
The stretched-out hands are alight
in the darkness like an old town.
ZBIGNIEW HERBERT
I
When I walked into the darkened room in the Tate Gallery in London, three video images were being projected across one wall. In the left-hand frame a woman is giving birth. She is crouching, leaning back into somebody’s arms, her muscles straining and contorting with each contraction. In the right-hand frame a video camera had recorded the face of an older woman. She is dying. She lies perfectly still and silent, her mouth dragged downward by a stroke, her cheek bones and her skull pressing through her papery skin, her breath a whisper. Birth and death. And between the two is the figure of a man floundering under water, and the sound of a muffled echoing.
Video artist Bill Viola’s Nantes Triptych is a technological version of a medieval altarpiece. It runs for approximately fifteen minutes: the woman struggles to give birth, the man rises and sinks, turning aimlessly in the water, and the older woman lies quite
