She was a mother, but that wasn’t all she was.
The Enemy, 2004
His mother was ‘mean’ and ‘malicious’. He had not a single happy memory of her. She was ‘a monster of martyrdom’ who resented her children and especially James, because he was the bad boy: the smoker, the football hooligan, the trade unionist, the Labour supporter, she didn’t know which was worst. One thing she did know: he was of no use to her. ‘I was the one who most disappointed her expectations,’ Lee said, although she never made clear what these were. But this much was clear: it was all about her.
For a while Audrey perceived a certain seductive symmetry between her own brood of boys and the high-flying Denning brothers, entertaining fantasies of how they might likewise rub shoulders with the great and the good as Master of the Rolls or Lieutenant General or Deputy Chief of Defence. Perhaps that was what the Christmas Wonder Books were about. Maybe one of them could get killed or die during a war like Alfred (Lord) Denning’s oldest sibling, and his youngest too. James, perhaps. Chief Troublemaker. Rex was employed On Her Majesty’s Service, which had to be a notch up from draper. The Dennings had started life at a school run by the National Society of Education for the Poor, no less. And then won scholarships to Andover Grammar and in the case of Lord Denning, a good conservative Christian, to Magdalen College, Oxford. Her boys had brains, and surely King Edward’s, founded in 1552, was the equal of Andover, not founded until 1571. Hadn’t William Shakespeare gone to King Edward’s, or as good as? And wasn’t he venerated by educated folk as the greatest of all Englishmen? Not that she wanted her sons to be writers or go on the stage. The neighbours might frown. Chief Justice or Chief Medical Officer would be acceptable. Anything the Dennings could do, the Grants could do better.
In the meantime, Audrey would focus on scrubbing the front doorstep. Cleanliness was next to godliness. She and Rex were not churchgoers, but adherents of a religious cult of respectability. They wanted to win first prize in the competition of the cleanest.
Lee had brushed up pretty well in the end. You could say he sparkled. But it wasn’t until she was into her seventies and had moved to Wales that his mother was able to take pleasure in his success, when she heard someone talking about one of his books at the hairdresser’s. She had waited long enough. Now at last that troublesome second son had given her some return on her emotional investment.
Which had been tremendous. After all, he had nearly died, when he was still her little boy. Not unlike Lord Denning, born two months early and so small and weak he was nicknamed ‘Tom Thumb’. James wasn’t like that. He had always been big. But being big didn’t make him invulnerable, and for a while it had been touch and go. And who was it who looked after him? Her, of course. His mother. Devoted, as a mother should be. Not that this had been appreciated, except by the ladies at the hairdresser’s.
James didn’t die, though he did metamorphose into someone else, out of Audrey’s reach. It was some kind of a heart thing, Lee said, brought on by a bout of rheumatic fever after a day spent heading the new leather football given to him by his Otley grandma (‘an old-fashioned two-panel design, with a pink rubber inflation nipple nestled in an opening that did up with a square-sectioned leather lace’), which explained why ‘heart things’ featured so regularly in his writing. He spent four weeks in Birmingham Children’s Hospital at the age of seven (‘a vital month of re-education’) and for a while was expected to drop dead at any moment. Everyone agreed that his life expectancy was limited. But it was fine, because being an invalid (like so many characters in fiction) gave him a lot of scope for reading. The flip side was it gave his mother a lot of scope for drama, too. There was a legitimate basis for her protective anxiety, but she stretched it as far as it was possible to go. Audrey didn’t really want him to recover, not totally. Being the mother of a boy who was flirting with death had a romance all of its own, second only to flirting with the doctors that came with it (‘like phoning Clark Gable or Omar Sharif, and having them show up at your house forty minutes later’). Come to think of it, that was another way he had let her down, by not actually dying. She could spare one son in the interests of a really good story. There was no getting away from it. He had been a disappointment.
James didn’t die. But he never fully recovered. Even now, doctors checking out the messed-up state of his valves and ventricles would marvel at his continued existence. Not that he had much time for doctors. The smoking probably didn’t help, either. Although if he gave it up he reckoned his heart might give up too. As it was it stopped beating a couple of times a week, sometimes while he was just sitting at his desk in front of the screen, the next Reacher story unfurling beneath his two index fingers, a thin string of cigarette smoke spiralling up from the glass ashtray to his left, and he would urge it to get going again: Come on, come on, he would say, underlining the point by a vigorous winding action of his right hand.
There was no doubt it had affected his outlook. But in a good way. Made him feel immortal. Death had missed its chance where he was concerned. He felt liberated. What fear could death hold for him, when his death had been so thoroughly rehearsed in his own – and his mother’s – mind? ‘I’m not afraid of death,’ Reacher-Lee says in Persuader. ‘Death’s afraid of me.’
You could see how the drama was re-enacted in his writing. Maybe he owed to his mother Reacher’s loneliness and alienation.
Audrey had inherited her father’s skill with a pencil. When she and Rex wanted to enclose the front porch at Underwood Road she gave the builder a picture to work from, a blend of architectural drawing and artistic sketch. Another time, on a visit to Otley, Harry Scrafton had dug out her old school sketchbook and shown Jim her winning entry in a poster competition for a London Zoo advertisement to go on a double-decker bus. Audrey had included the bus for context, showing how her design would run the full length of it, with a monkey dangling sweetly from the lower bar of the ‘Z’.
James wasn’t great at art. But once when a new teacher joined Cherry Orchard he’d somehow fluked something halfway decent in the first lesson. Then again the week after that. Whereupon the teacher gave him responsibility for producing the class wall art and he spent the rest of that term living in fear of being found out. Impostor syndrome. It was an anxiety he would relive in writing each of his twenty-four novels – would he be revealed as a fraud, was this a book too far?
Was art something Audrey liked to talk about? I asked.
He didn’t stop to think about it. ‘It was impossible to explore any conversational subject with her.’ Some uneducated people were autodidacts, he said, and remain open to learning all their lives. Not so Audrey (though she was a competent academic Germanist, just as Rex could read and translate from Italian). At the time of the lunar landings there were lots of pictures of the moon’s surface. The impact craters were due to the moon having no atmosphere, Jim explained. But Audrey scorned this scientific fact. ‘Every woman who’s ever cooked porridge knows why the moon looks like that,’ she said, banging her wooden spoon on the rim of the saucepan. ‘She was claiming knowledge while revealing ignorance, at the same time making sure we knew that all she ever got to do was cook porridge for her ungrateful family. It was painful.’
As it was for Richard the time she lost her temper and whacked him with a handy plastic racquet from their beach tennis set. Rex was buttoned up, but Audrey was volatile.
The Grant family women had all suffered lifelong frustration: the miller’s wife who could read but only afford to send the youngest of her seven children to school, the university student who left Queen’s without the degree she deserved, and Audrey Scrafton, Lee’s mother, dumped in the nowheresville of Otley and delivered into the suffocating hands of middle-class morality.
Josephine Reacher, in contrast, has no need to live out her fantasies through her sons.
Reacher’s mother, not his Marine Corps father, is the rock on which the family is founded.
The way she took charge spooled us all backward in time. Joe and I shrank back to skinny kids and she bloomed into the matriarch she had once been. A military wife and mother has a pretty hard time, and some handle it, and some don’t. She always had. Wherever we had lived had been home. She had seen to that.
Only eighteen months before ‘she had looked like a person with a lot of life left’. But this, in The Enemy, is their last meeting as a (now fatherless) family. Maman is too good to live forever. She has only days left. But she has put fresh flowers on the nightstands and made up the beds with crisp, clean linen. Next morning they had breakfast together: ‘It was a civilized meal. Like we used to have, long ago. Like an old family ritual.’
Other than the sorry tale of the loveless porridge Lee had little to say about the meals Audrey presided over, except that if she ever found out he liked something she would strike it off the menu. Her attention was focused on first-born Richard, who had caused his helpless parents lifelong trauma by flat-out refusing to eat from the moment he was weaned. James was never fussy, but had grown up ‘without learning that food had any value’, and could still remember the specific taste sensation of the first meal he consciously enjoyed, at a Lebanese restaurant in Washington, DC. By which time it was 1976 and he was twenty-two years old. He had got into the habit of living off bowls of cereal. Home alone, cheese on toast was pushing the boat out.
Reacher’s mother is warm, affectionate, demonstrative – everything that Audrey is not. She smiles at her boys, hugs them and kisses them and tells them she loves them. She calls them darling. But they’re all grown-up now, and her job is done. They don’t need her any more. ‘That’s natural, and that’s good. That’s life. So let me go.’
Like Reacher himself, his mother is a fatalist. Conceptually, death doesn’t come as a surprise.
‘It’s something that’s been happening since the dawn of time. It has to happen, don’t you see? If people didn’t die, the world would be an awfully crowded place by now.’
This, I knew, was Lee speaking. He was always spooling back to the dawn of time, to the point where the human story began, and had for a few years belonged to the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement. It was a commitment to having only one child, a way of pushing back against the population explosion.
When interviewers put it to him, he rejected the legacy question. He had no interest in living on through his grandchildren. He liked reading biographies of other people, but wasn’t sure he wanted one of his own. (He would far rather dream up fictional versions: After ten years as Aston Villa’s top scorer and a brief marriage to Charlize Theron…)
Reacher’s big-picture perspective is established in The Enemy. Sidekick Summer puzzles over his calm containment in the face of imminent loss. Doesn’t he like his mother? ‘I like her fine. But, you know, nobody lives forever.’ Whether you like them fine or not. Missing the dead was an integral part of life.
Lee gets us emotionally entangled with Reacher’s mother only to immediately kill her off. So it’s both a miracle and a mercy when he brings her back to life in Second Son, a prequel to a prequel, set before The Enemy, which is set before Killing Floor. The advance knowledge the author has of his main characters is what gives this novella its resonance. When Josie gets a phone call that her father is dying, she drops everything and heads for Paris in just the same way her sons will, sixteen years later.
The leave-taking at Okinawa airport prefigures that future farewell. It is Reacher who asks if his mother wants company. It is Reacher she takes aside (just as Rex and Audrey did when James was about to start school), because it’s to him that she entrusts responsibility for the family in her absence (just as Richard was entrusted to James). Both brother and father get into trouble and it’s Reacher who steps up and does what is necessary, not all of it pretty, but all of it ‘what Mom told me to’.
Wondering at the moodiness of Stan and Joe, Reacher finds them ‘silent and strained’ to an ‘excessive’ degree.
No question that grandpa Moutier was a nice old guy, but any ninety-year-old was by definition limited in the life expectancy department. No big surprise. The guy had to croak sometime. No one lives forever.
Death. That’s life. Or the obverse of it, at least.
Audrey Grant lacks Mme Reacher’s sophisticated savoir faire. But like Audrey, Josie ‘cared about our education. She taught us things, me and my brother Joe.’ Like Latin. In a rare scene showing Reacher with both his parents – the first time we see all three together – they are discussing how he can’t skive off to Paris to see his dying grandfather because he has an all-important entrance test to take.
His own mother didn’t even teach James to read and write English. But it was thanks to her that he fell in love with Shakespeare. Audrey belonged to the Young Wives’ Club and would occasionally get tickets for the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford-upon-Avon. One day Rex took his second son to see Henry IV, Part 2. James was nine years old and ‘already a hater’. He knew he’d been dragged along because going to Shakespeare plays was what aspirational families did. But ‘the two hours just vanished’. The experience was inexplicably intense and he was transfixed, from the first moment to the last.
After that he went back whenever he could, catching the bus to Stratford on his own. It was nice of his mother to get the tickets, I thought. But Lee was having none of that. ‘She got them as part of her own class fantasies. My enthusiasm was a happy collateral consequence.’ Had he asked for them, she would have artfully contrived to provide something else. It was all-out psychological warfare, with each of them trying to outwit the other.
Audrey was as much a disappointment to Jim as he was to her. At the Darien Library in 2010 he explained how Janet Salter got her name in 61 Hours. Mark Salter had won a charity auction in aid of autism research and asked for his mother’s name to be included in Lee’s next book. Mark Salter was clearly a very nice man. ‘Often,’ Lee said, ‘not always – perhaps not in my case – if there’s a nice man, standing behind him somewhere is a nice mother.’ The personal aside had been strictly unnecessary.
Reacher doesn’t fight against his mother, not even when he is losing her.
You die when it’s your time, Josie says.
‘It’s like walking out of a movie. Being made to walk out of a movie that you’re really enjoying. That’s what worried me about it. I would never know how it turned out. I would never know what happened to you boys in the end, with your lives. I hated that part. But then I realized, obviously I’ll walk out of the movie sooner or later. I mean, nobody lives forever. I’ll never know how it turns out for you. I’ll never know what happens with your lives. Not in the end. Not even under the best of circumstances. I realized that. Then it didn’t seem to matter so much. It will always be an arbitrary date. It will always leave me wanting more.’
This stands as Lee’s take on John Donne (‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’), or Dylan Thomas (‘Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night’), or Corinthians (‘When I was a child, I spake as a child’). Maybe one day it would become equally canonical.
In the latter part of his career, New York’s Mysterious Bookshop began to release leather-bound and marbled collectors’ editions of the Reacher novels, lettered and numbered. Each includes an introduction by the author. Reflecting on The Enemy, Lee says:
The ‘walking out of the movie’ speech the mother delivers, and the dialogue before and after it, is some of the writing I’m happiest with. There was something important I wanted to tell my daughter, but some things are hard to say, so I had Reacher’s mother tell Reacher and his brother instead.
Readers took comfort in the down-to-earth no-nonsense way he cut the enemy down to size and rendered it human: the one thing we all share in common. ‘People live, and then they die,’ Reacher says in Tripwire. ‘And as long as they do both things properly, there’s nothing much to regret.’ There’s a caveat. But the basic message is Hey, don’t beat yourself up. You did the best you could, probably.
‘I’m with Kafka,’ Lee says at the end of Andy Martin’s With Child: Lee Child and the Readers of Jack Reacher. ‘The meaning of life is that it ends.’
He didn’t want a fuss.
Our period of residence was uncertain. Death was always going to come knocking in the middle of the movie.