‘I will not let thee go, except thou bless me.’
– Jacob to the Angel, Genesis 32.26
When I came home from Dublin in 1962 I was twelve weeks pregnant. On the way back across the Irish Sea I was sick as a dog. In London I went about acquiring an abortion. Fast. At that time, abortion was illegal and expensive. Through a friend who was a nurse, I was put in touch with a Polish doctor who, for the fee of £100, was prepared to do the operation. I gave neither the safety nor the morality of my decision much thought: actually, to call it a ‘decision’ feels inaccurate. Whereas getting pregnant had seemed to me an impossibility, the getting of an abortion was necessitated by its possibility. In a sense, I had no choice (by which I certainly don’t mean to exonerate myself of responsibility). I was about to take up my place at university and neither motherhood nor marriage played any part in my plans. The doctor, an attractive, world-weary man wearing several gold rings, was sufficiently morally – or maliciously? – engaged to tell me the foetus was a healthy male child. The last abandoned child of this story. I still catch myself occasionally looking at a man in his late ‘forties, a handsome man whose hairline is maybe already beginning to recede, and thinking, That could be my son.
Whatever else it may be, abortion is always an act of violence and usually, even now, of secrecy. Of course it is. And that’s a matter of more than hypocrisy or ‘delicacy’. In my own little drama of life and death I chose, after all, to destroy an entire and unique script, perhaps denying – for example – a new life to my uncle Tom’s blue eyes, or his way with girls and horses. After the operation, I got up and walked out of the surgery. I spent one night with my boyfriend in a friend’s flat where I remember hearing a record of the Everly Brothers singing ‘God Only Knows’.
Early the following morning in New Malden the telephone went and my mother answered. A man’s voice: ‘Mrs Wadey? There’s something I thought you should know. Your daughter’s just had an abortion.’ We never knew who made that call. The doctor – perhaps conscience-stricken, or merely anxious? A malicious ex-boyfriend? My mother sat waiting for me to get home.
I closed the front door behind me. My mother turned from the window where she’d been waiting. Her face was white, twisted with pain, and there followed the most bitter scene that ever took place between us. My mother returned to the blistering form I remembered from my childhood when, at the flick of a switch, she could summon a hurricane that threatened to annihilate anything that got caught up in her whirling skirts. My argument that it had happened, it was over, that although I was too young to have a baby my boyfriend and I loved one another and wanted to live together, every link in this argument provoked a volcanic reaction of anger and distress: ‘Go then! Go and live together in some filthy hole and see how happy you are! You’re intelligent, you’ve had an education, and you’ve thrown yourself away on a young man who’ll stick at nothing. You’ll never keep him! He’s too charming for his own good. You’ve made yourself cheap as dirt, like any common stupid girl with no upbringing and no sense. So STUPID.’
How would it have been if my mother had then broken down and told me the story of Nancy and her baby? If she’d broken her silence and confided frankly in me, woman to woman, that her own most beloved sister had been equally cheap, dirty, and ‘STUPID’? How would I have taken it? Would I have been consoled by a sense of continuity, of a shared female fate – or would I have felt labelled, trapped? Surely, surely my mother and I could have spoken heart to heart and been comforted? Did she perhaps feel, even now – thirty years later, but Nancy was still alive at this time – that Nancy’s secret was not hers to tell?
The fact is, even under these extreme circumstances I wasn’t told, and that day’s terrible outburst – and its consequences – remained part of our relationship over the coming years. But none of it was referred to ever again and my father never knew. ‘If my father and my brothers knew they’d kill us!’ Shame. Sexual shame, a constant it seems in all societies and almost always blamed on women. And how especially true that was in the Ireland my mother had grown up in: sexual ignorance and shame, hand in hand. Now her daughter, who’d been brought up under the imperative to be perfect, her daughter had got herself into the same dirty stupid mess as her sister. But if it was impossible for my mother to speak, it would have been just as impossible for me to hear.
This taboo on openness between mothers and daughters, the secrecy which saps female self-worth, may seem to have been broken. The boundaries between what can and can’t be said have certainly shifted. But girls quickly work out where the silences still fall and their mothers, poor dears, are not only women but old women. Sexism and ageism, that toxic combination, still alive and well.
At that time, I was myself a young woman fast-forwarding away from the past, away from my mother, just as she had done from hers. My mother was the only one of the Kavanaghs who left Ireland without her rosary or her prayer book. Part of her care of me had been to open her hand and let me swim free, unburdened. A priceless gift.
But of course the past was still powerfully at work in her, and it was this that had now reached out and grabbed me by the scruff of the neck. The past, the dead – as I understand now – never quite lose their power, neither in nations nor in individuals, never mind all the willed forgetting.
With time self-creation becomes – perhaps surprisingly – not second nature but an increasingly demanding and exhausting project. The forward-pointing arrow of time slows, and age brings an inclination to sink back into the earth, into one’s roots. My mother’s roots were in Catholic Ireland. As she occasionally said, ‘It must be a wonderful thing to believe.’ But the consolations of Catholicism were lost to her the moment she opened that letter from the Cúnamh Rescue Society in Dublin informing her that her sister Nancy’s soul, and that of her newborn baby, were at risk of damnation. Agnes was the only one of the Kavanaghs who left Ireland without her rosary or her prayer book and although a sense of the sacred never left her, my mother’s new life was lived out in what Seamus Heaney has called ‘the weightless, profane spaces of the secular world’. And for the greater part she was content in that space which, as a young woman, she’d actively sought out. But in old age she might have been happier had she been able to reconcile her two selves: her rooted Irish self, and the assimilated immigrant self who came into her glory in her middle years. Once Nancy died, however, the last meaningful link to her youth was gone. Often in this story I’ve remarked, ‘she never said,’ ‘my mother never mentioned it,’ or ‘this was something my mother never spoke about,’ a refrain which doesn’t so much offer some kind of criticism as underline her loneliness, her never-to-be-lost status as an emigrant, which may have contributed to an inherited vulnerability to depression.
On what was to be our last Monday evening together my mother was tired. We were talking in a desultory way about her brothers and sisters when she remarked, ‘Mother never used our names except to tick us off.’
‘You don’t use mine much.’
‘Well there’s only one of you, isn’t there?’ Then, ‘I christened you Margaret. It was you who named yourself Maggie.’
Ah, yes. Existentialism! Self-invention. Child pitted against parent: ‘I won’t be what you made me. I’ll be my own person.’ Uncharacteristically, I pushed her a little.
‘Don’t you like it?’ I asked.
She looked at me with surprisingly bright eyes.
‘Oh I like it well enough,’ she said.
So you see, those Monday evenings were important to us both. Although this was the period when I gave my mother many of the books she read with such quiet, reflective attention, and although we had a long-standing and easy modus vivendi – not least because of our love for my daughter – my mother and I still, in effect, stood either side of that black Dublin canal, in silence, unable to recognise one another. Now we were perhaps poised to speak, to see, to listen? Or maybe not. My mother, as I have since discovered, had her own reasons for silence, which neither I nor my father knew anything of. Another reason was that we’d never entirely recovered from that explosive scene which had taken place between us nearly forty years earlier.
The only thing that would assuage my mother’s pain was marriage – this in spite of the fact that she believed the marriage to be entirely unsuitable. Two months later, my father flew home from Belize (he was there on a short assignment which had, of necessity, been solo), I hired a fur cape from the Ladies’ Department of Moss Bros. and, shaking in my winkle-picker shoes, John and I married at Kingston Register Office one snowy day in January 1963. Ironic, really. A shotgun wedding after the event. There was, after all, no baby, John by that time had rather gone off the idea of marriage, and I’d never been on it, seeing myself as a lover rather than a wife. My beautiful volatile young man’s life had only just begun: he had left Trinity, Dublin, to become a student on a scholarship at RADA, and the world – some of it in the shape of very pretty young women – really was at his feet. I persuaded myself that marriage was a mere formality. Instead of church bells, we married with the dire predictions of family and friends ringing in our ears.
We were in love, but we were also young. Very young. I was twenty (just three months younger than my father when he married), and John reached twenty-three only five days before our wedding. In September that year I took up my hard-won place in the philosophy department at University College London, a married woman with no time for extracurricular life. Five years later I had my MPhil, John had begun a successful career as an actor, and we had our baby daughter. Still, there’d been grounds enough for the skeptics’ fears.
John’s godmother, Biddy, a worldly and sophisticated woman, had seen traits in me that would prove especially trying to her adored godson: I was ‘too cold, too clever, too independent’. And, as my mother had seen, my husband possessed just those characteristics that would prove in due course especially tormenting to me. But then, in love, isn’t torment what we look for as much as pleasure, instinctively seeking out the education of both our souls and our senses in the deep, secret battles and consiliences of marriage? My husband had reserves of loyalty and generosity my mother came greatly to love and appreciate and the fact is, nearly fifty years later, John and I are still together.
When I feel her, I feel her in my blood, in the set of my shoulders, in my DNA, in the dark. When I see her, I see her in the middle distance, walking away from me down an alleyway in Venice, picking an apple in a garden in France, always somewhat adream, and if our eyes meet, hers are a touch unfocused. When she looks at me I can’t tell what she sees.
When I was thirty-two I had published a novel. A few nice reviews, pathetic sales. At the time I managed not to think about the issues in the book that my mother would have difficulty with, including the central character’s abortion. It must have made painful reading, and though I honestly don’t recall how much thought I’d given to her reaction, no doubt it wasn’t enough; my book and my mother existed in different rooms in my mind. Now I acknowledge that I caused her real pain, bringing mess and stink like the foxes to her own front doorstep.
But she had loved the foxes, too.
At the time, mixed pride and embarrassment, a hint of distress, were the only reactions to my novel that she shared with me. Until, that is, many years later on one of our Monday evenings together, when she told me she’d just reread my book and that she’d ‘really enjoyed it’, even that she ‘admired’ it. I was surprised and moved. There was a pause. We looked at one another and vast questions began to balloon on the air between us, but we let the moment pass. We didn’t ask. Didn’t speak. I didn’t speak. It’s only now I see it was my place to have done so, then, that evening.
I am left talking to myself.
So do I only have the courage to speak out now she’s dead? Well of course the answer has to be ‘yes’, though perhaps ‘courage’ – with its suggestion of cowardice in not writing about her whilst she was alive – isn’t the right word. ‘Don’t you answer back!’ my mother used to say to me through gritted teeth when I was a lippy child.
The last time I saw my her well and at home was on the occasion of my husband’s and my thirty-sixth wedding anniversary when my mother took us all, including our daughter, out to dinner. When I say she took us out, I mean she paid for it. My father was always good at recognizing and valuing the work my mother did in the house. He paid money directly into her bank account which it was her responsibility to manage, and she managed it very well. That money was hers, and they both saw it that way. So it was sometimes she who took us out, and doing so gave her huge pleasure, especially that night. Somehow we were all on especially good form and Shelley, who was thirty-two on that day, was spirited and beautiful. As we chose and shared dishes my mother’s refrain was, ‘Have plenty, have plenty!’
We were all very relaxed and my mother allowed her feelings to show. Shiny-eyed, she kept looking from face to face and then around the pretty Italian restaurant with its elaborate sweets trolley and candlelit tables as if she’d found herself in fairyland. She was happy. She noticed things were good between my husband and me again and, with a raffish look in her eye, she raised her glass and said, ‘Well, I don’t know what it is he’s doing, but it’s obviously good for you!’
My mother wasn’t much of a drinker and that evening she ended up tiddly. She was light-hearted and charmingly, a little awkwardly affectionate, holding on to her granddaughter’s hand, linking her arm through both of ours and kicking up her heels as we walked back to the car. When we got home, she went upstairs, and after a few minutes I followed, to check that she was okay. I found her in their bedroom doorway, standing on one leg and helpless with laughter. The zip on her dress had caught on her petticoat and she’d got into an impossible tangle. I helped her out of her dilemma and then, leaning against the bannister, I laughed with her. The next time I saw her was in the hospital bed the day before she died.
Agnes outlived her own mother by twenty years. I go upstairs to the bedroom where my father has still left many of her things just as she used them: her talcum powder by the bed, her slippers, her silver-backed hairbrush on the dressing table. That photograph of her on the arm of a young man in the uniform of a British soldier. There’s not just silence here but peace. Stillness. My mother’s public persona – her manner, her voice, her touch – was notably gentle and sensitive. Yet in private, in times of intense emotion, what she revealed was a volcanic power which, as a young person, I took for her true inner nature. Knowing her more intimately, though at a distance, I see that gentleness and sensitivity were very much there at her core, too – as a girl, as my father’s shy lover, as a young mother.
I go to stand at the window looking out. In the last years of her life, my mother slept badly. Sometimes, when she felt like the only human being awake on the entire planet, she used to get out of bed to make tea and from the darkened window she might see the fox – one of ‘her’ foxes fleeting away down the road. At the corner he’d look back over one shoulder, holding his brush horizontal, stiff as a shop bouquet in the hand of an iffy suitor. Then swiftly he was gone from sight, like a puff of smoke from a silent shot.
In later life, my parents seemed to be pulling in opposite directions. My father would very much like to have played bridge more often. Many of his activities took him away from the house, leaving my mother on her own. Recently, he said of himself, ‘No one could live with me now.’ Adding, ‘I don’t expect they ever could.’ My mother, meanwhile, still had dreams of elsewhere. Her favourite dream was a cottage in Shere, the village not far from London where she’d enjoyed paddling with her granddaughter. Along the path that leads back to the village is a flint wall enclosing a vegetable garden where dahlias grow in amongst the runner beans. A line of cottages overlooks the garden, within sound of the river. This last dream of my mother’s – not really within their grasp financially – was a modest version of the dreams my father had responded to when they were young, dreams which had propelled them up, up and away. But in later life, in this matter at least, my father’s law prevailed and, having moved to their home in New Malden, that’s where they stayed. Besides, my mother was tired. Only her ashes made it to the shallow river at Shere.
How was that night, that long last Sunday of their lives together? I’ll never know, could never really know, even with every detail spelt out to me. ‘Pity she didn’t come to us sooner’ the doctors had said. But my mother had fiercely resisted all suggestion of being rushed into hospital. Having talked it over in calmer times I understand that my father had repeatedly begged her to allow him to call the ambulance. That she had repeatedly said no. Heart attack or not, she was at her imperious best. Not until six in the morning, not until it was ‘too late’, had she given in. Did she perhaps understand more of what had happened than she let on, wanting above all else to avoid life as an invalid? The fact is that, with my father’s support, she achieved that most lucky thing: a quick and relatively painless death. Had he acted differently it would have been a longer and much unhappier story.
A perfect early summer morning, presented like an expensive hotel breakfast, under a polished dome of silvery sky. The trees that stand along the driveway are composed all of light, gouts of bright light, green and yellow, verdigris gobbets flung down by the rain and sunshine, sparkling and shaking as if about to disperse, to vanish on the bright air. Through a gateway into the walled garden I can see a mass of wet, open, sun-warmed flowers. I am a step or two behind my mother who is walking slowly, putting her feet down softly like someone listening. The air is filled with the pulsing drone of wood pigeons. A young man with rolled-up sleeves and a shovel crusted with dark earth goes along the path. Otherwise the garden is empty. My mother’s smile is dazed.
‘How lovely,’ she says, looking towards the sunlit trees. ‘How peaceful it is here.’
The young man stops. His eyes follow hers.
‘Yes,’ he agrees, ‘it is peaceful, isn’t it.’
If the weather gets better then next week we’ll go down to Shere, my father and I. Like Russian Orthodox Christians sitting on the family grave knocking back vodka and blinis, we too have a place to go to, to sit and remember. We’ll pack sandwiches and a flask of tea, and we’ll picnic – with neither vodka nor faith – on the grassy bank of the river where we scattered her ashes. ‘If’ – she will whisper in my ear as we pass through the kissing gate – ‘if they really are my ashes.’ And the following year, though I don’t know this yet, my father and I will go to Shere again, on the tenth anniversary of her death, February 23rd, 2009, my father now aged ninety. A bright, cold day with brief flurries of snow falling on early daffodils.
As we stand on the little footbridge over the river, facing into the wind, my father will say, ‘Your mother was the only person ever really to have any influence on me.’ I am surprised and moved beyond replying. ‘I always thought she was very brave to come over here like that, alone.’ I, just as there are many occasions when I haven’t spoken out, so there are lots of things my father hasn’t said either. Different things from me, totally different. Different thoughts, different feelings. We both look down at the water rushing away beneath us. ‘When my time comes,’ he says, ‘I hope you’ll bring my ashes here, too.’
Over the years since my mother’s death my father and I have grown closer. Sometimes in his company I get my childhood self back. He and I become part of the same chattering straightforward tribe, cheerful, busy, collecting things, cracking corny jokes and whistling, happy as sandboys. Then, like a current in the air, a change in temperature, something halts me. I stand, struck silent maybe by the light, or a sound and I’m taken away, as at the call of my mother’s voice, possessed by different gods, just as it was once believed that Pan would take you if you stood too long in the midday sun. It was our own story she wanted to tell. I picked up the thread, I took it and ran, terrified I might drop it and be lost. I’ve recorded as well as I’m able what I found, including forgotten names and things that were hidden. Was that what she intended?
By the time we get back to the house, a chill winter dusk has fallen. My father puts out scraps for the foxes. But later, when I go outside to look at the night sky, I sense they’ve gone, that where they had been, hungry and inquisitive, there’s only darkness and a sense of tension. Above the trees the mineral stars don’t even blink. There’s a tug on the thread. I feel it slip through my fingers. Like all good storytellers my mother has led me here, and told me to continue alone. I let her go.