I suspect that it was that house, rather than the convent, that really left its mark upon my mother’s character and established, if it did not give her, standards of behaviour that would have been exacting in any social group and were impossible in the gutter where the world had thrown her. She rarely permitted herself to comment on any tiny treachery she had observed in one of my friends, and I used to persuade myself that she had not noticed, but if worse happened, and she felt free to speak, it became clear that she had seen every detail and felt it more than I. Sometimes she observed things that nobody else had observed. Once I laughed outright at her when she said of a brilliant young artist who came to the flat: ‘I’d have nothing to do with that boy. There’s a streak of imbecility in him,’ but time proved her right.
She rarely asked anything for herself, never made scenes, and often went for months without the commonest necessities rather than complain. On her seventieth birthday she had a very bad fall, and the doctor who examined her told me that all her life she had suffered from chronic appendicitis. When she really did want something – usually something that involved the pleasure of a third party, like the cousins of mine to whom in her last years she was devoted – she dripped hints like a leaky old tap. On the other hand, ‘hints’ is a crude word for the photograph casually dropped where I would be bound to see it, or for the gossamer off-key phrases that seemed to be intended as a sort of psychological conditioning that might ultimately influence my conduct subconsciously; and I noticed that when the hints went on too long and I shouted at her, she seemed to be less hurt by the shout than by my discovery of her innocent little plot. At such moments, I fancy, she probably blamed herself severely for a lack of delicacy.
That curious negative energy gave her an almost uncanny power of inducing people to confide in her. She woke very early, with a passion for tea, and when we were staying in a London hotel I made a deal with the chambermaid to bring it to her when she herself came on duty. When I called for her at nine o’clock Mother had acquired the material for a full-length novel of life in Devon from the maid. On the same morning I had an interview with my agent, and left her sitting in Trafalgar Square. When I returned forty-five minutes later, a good-looking woman was sitting beside her. Mother had got the material for another novel. By that time she knew as much about the life of ordinary people in England as I would learn in years. She was uncomfortable abroad even more than I was but for the same reason – all that lovely material going to waste – but in Switzerland she met the Swiss woman who spoke English and got her life story as well.
Naturally, with that sort of mind she loved novels, particularly Victorian novels, but she had a similar passion for classical music. She made a point of never intruding on me, because I might be ‘thinking’, but she reserved her rights in respect of thinking to music, and I had only to put the needle on a gramophone record to see her shuffle in, smiling, her shawl round her shoulders, and settle on the chair nearest the door. The smile, as well as the choice of chair, clearly indicated that she was not disturbing me because she wasn’t really there. Sometimes if I had visitors she didn’t want to interrupt, she would give the handle of my door a gentle twist, leave the door ajar, and then sit on a chair outside. She had a passion for Schubert and Mozart, and loved soprano voices and violins – the high, pure, piercing tone. It took me longer to discover her taste in fiction, because her comments on anything were so direct and simple that they could appear irrelevant. She talked as a child talks, completely without self-consciousness. Once she practically burst into tears when I brought her a novel of Walter Scott’s and cried: ‘But you know I can’t read Scotch!’ It took me years to discover that she didn’t really like dialect. Another time I brought her a novel by Peadar O’Donnell, whom she loved, but she had read only a few pages when I saw her getting fretful.
‘What is it now?’ I growled.
‘Ah, didn’t you notice?’ she asked reproachfully, looking at me over her glasses. ‘Nearly every sentence begins with “I”.’
From remarks like these one had to deduce what she meant, but often no deductions were necessary. Once I took her on a funicular to the top of some Alp, and as we sat on the terrace of a restaurant far above the glittering lake, I enthused about the view. ‘There should be great drying up here,’ she said thoughtfully, her mind reverting to the problem of laundry.
In spite of her gentleness, there was a streak of terribleness in her – something that was like a Last Judgement, and (as I suspect the Last Judgement will be) rather less than just. I think it was linked in a curious way with her weakness for tearing up pictures of herself that she didn’t like and removing pictures of the woman she disapproved of from photograph albums, and echoed some childish magic, some reconstruction of reality to make it less intolerable. During court proceedings about my right to visit my children, after my wife and I were separated, Mother learned that they were in court and, against my wishes, insisted on seeing them. I went with her to the witnesses’ room, and when the children saw her they slunk away with their heads down. She went up to them slowly, her two hands out, as she had gone up to the mad boy in Blarney Lane, saying in a whisper: ‘Darlings, won’t you speak to me? It’s only Dunnie.’ (Dunnie was their pet name for her.) I could bear it no longer and, putting my arm round her, made her leave the room. She stood against the wall outside with her face suddenly gone white and stony, and said: ‘I’m eighty-five, but I’ve learned a new thing today. I’ve learned that you can turn children into devils.’ Then and later I argued angrily with her, pleading that you cannot hold children responsible for what they do when they are frightened, but she never spoke their names again. I insisted on speaking to her about them, and she listened politely because she knew I was doing what I thought ‘right,’ which was the only test of conduct she admitted, but she offered no opinion, and it was clear that their photographs had been taken out of whatever album she carried in her mind. The woman who all her life had sought love could not entertain the idea of a child who, she thought, rejected it.
A couple of weeks before that, our next-door neighbour in the little ‘development’ where we lived had died. His younger daughter had put in a good deal of unpaid work as secretary of the Tenants’ Association. But the family was Protestant, and by this time Irish Catholics no longer attended Protestant funerals – a refinement of conscience that had completely escaped Mother’s attention. She only realized it when the funeral was ready to start and none of the hundred families in the estate development had shown up. I was waiting at the front door, with my coat and hat on, and as she rushed out I tried to detain her. ‘How dare you!’ she cried frantically. ‘Let me go! Do you think I could let that poor woman go with her husband’s body to the grave thinking that those miserable cowards are Catholics?’ She ran out in front of the house, her grey hair blowing in the wind, and held out her hands to the widow. ‘I’m old and feeble, or I’d be along with you today,’ she said, glaring round at the estate houses, where people watched from behind drawn blinds. ‘What those creatures are doing to you – that’s not Catholic; that’s not Irish.’
When she was dead, and I had done all the futile things she would have wished, like bringing her home across the sea to rest with Father, and when the little girl who had refused to speak to her in court had knelt beside the coffin in the luggage van at Kingsbridge, and the little boy had joined the train at Limerick Junction, I returned to the house she had left. When she fell ill, I had been teaching the child who was left me a Negro spiritual, and now when we came home together and I opened the front door, he felt that everything was going to be the same again and that we could go back to our singing. He began, in a clear treble: ‘Child, I know you’re going to miss me when I’m gone.’ Then only did I realize the horror that had haunted me from the time I was his age and accompanied Mother to the orphanage, and learned for the first time the meaning of parting and death, had happened at last to me, and that it made no difference to me that I was fifty and a father myself.
And I await the resurrection from the dead and eternal life to come.