YOU REMEMBER THAT EXPERIMENT WITH IRON FILINGS AND A magnet the science teacher did at school when you were of an age still easy to amaze? You remember the way the iron filings, which were scattered like a mess of dust on a sheet of paper, suddenly formed into clean strong patterns when the magnet was placed in the middle of the mess, revealing the magnet’s magnetic field? Oo-arr, from the kids who’d never seen this magic before. (Do they still do that in schools?)
I was reminded of this when I arrived at the Williamsons on Saturday and saw Karl preparing lunch. Since the crisis, he had been like the mess of iron filings. Disarranged. Now he was magnetised, his filings composed into the pattern of his self. It isn’t an exaggeration to say he was glowing with energy. The change was palpable. Before, he had been uneasy with himself. Now he was comfortable in his skin.
Some words from my religious past came to mind. He once was lost, and now is found.
Good spirits are infectious.
Mrs. Williamson was jocular, which I had not seen before. I caught a glimpse of what she must have been like when she was young and happily married, with infant Karl to coddle and tend.
She did a good line in joshing.
“Come and meet the master chef,” she said with a wink when she let me in. And teased Karl now and then during the meal, a tickling he enjoyed while pretending pokerfaced toleration of his mother’s jokes.
Another pretence—that I was there as a thank-you—was kept up throughout the meal. And because nothing could be said about why I was really there, and any talk of recent unhappy events would have dampened the jollity, Mrs. Williamson plumped for the safe strategy of asking me the usual questions people ask a writer. How I got started and why, how many books I’d written and what kind. Which led by association to where I was born, and what my parents did, and what kind of boy I’d been. But no questions about my wife, for which I was grateful.
Karl listened but said nothing. He played the part of cook and waiter with the easy care I’d come to know was natural to him, whatever he did. But at the same time I sensed he’d rather I hadn’t been asked about myself, and I wondered why. The clue came later.
By the time we were eating the ice cream I’d brought as my contribution, I was puzzling how to introduce the topic of Karl’s activity in the shed without spooking him. I knew he’d baulk, shy away and clam up if I got it wrong. We’d finished the meal before I’d made up my mind. But need not have worried. Mrs. Williamson knew her son, and was blessed with more savvy than I’d so far guessed at.
“Have you noticed,” she said to me, still in her joshing tone, “how craftsmen never clear up after themselves? They need labourers to skivvy for them. His father was like that. And like father, like son. So you two go and do whatever men do after feeding their faces, while I clear the table and wash the dishes.”
She got up and began stacking the plates, and as she did so, bent over her son, kissed him on the head, and said in her genuine voice, “That was a delicious meal, my love. Thanks for making it.”
“Hear, hear!” I said.
Karl affected a suitable modesty, but a blush and lowered eyes betrayed his pleasure.
“We’ll help you,” I said, out of politeness, but without making a move, aware of what she was up to.
“No, you won’t, thank you all the same,” Mrs. Williamson said. “You’re a guest, and in this house guests don’t do chores.”
She went off into the kitchen.
I looked at Karl, smiled, and shrugged.
He got up, nodded “Follow me,” and without a word led the way through the kitchen, out the back door, down a path at the side of the lawn to a substantial shed at the bottom of the garden.
I don’t mean to boast when I say I had an inkling of what I would be shown.
The shed was generously kitted out. A multitude of tools and gear neatly arranged, everything in its place. And filled with that workshop smell of sawdust and oil mixed with the tang of electricity given off by power tools. A handyman’s paradise.
This was a quick impression, because my eye was caught at once by a number of objects—eight or nine—carefully placed on the workbench, like a little exhibition. They were made of thick black wire bent into a variety of shapes. Some were very simple, no more than two or three separate lengths, bent into shapes and placed together in what was clearly meant to be an intended, not an accidental, arrangement. Others were more complicated, made of one length of wire bent into elaborate, almost knotted interwindings.
I could see the inspiration for some of them was William Tucker’s sculpture, which is what I’d guessed I’d find. Others were quite different.
Words are the worst tools for describing objects. I don’t know whether teachers still do it, but when I was a kid, they used to give us an exercise that began with the instruction, “Imagine that a man from outer space has come to Earth. Describe a screwdriver to him as clearly as you can.”
The spaceman, poor guy, has presumably wandered up and somehow indicated—because of course he can’t speak any Earth language—that his UFO has conked out and can you help him, please. In a flash, without a moment wasted on intelligent astonishment, you give him a detailed description of a screwdriver, regardless of the fact that he cannot understand a word you’re saying and assuming without further investigation that this is the implement the stranded spaceman needs.
Ah, the pleasures of school, where, we’re told, we spend the happiest days of our lives!
Hard enough to describe objects with an everyday practical purpose, it’s impossible to describe objects that aren’t meant to be used, that don’t look like anything you have seen before, and are made out of material like paint, and metal pipes, and pieces of wood and stone and clay. Sculptures. Objects made into shapes that represent nothing except the shape itself. And even if they are objects that represent things we know—landscapes, buildings, people, plants, animals, the sea, whatever—they aren’t meant to be described, or presumably their makers would have used words rather than made the objects. They are objects intended for you to look at and work out what they mean from the feelings and thoughts they excite in you.
In other words, works of art.
The fact is, art objects aren’t meant to be described. If there’s anything to be said about them it’s what you want to say because of what they have done to you.
As I looked at Karl’s miniature sculptures I rather dreaded he’d ask me what I thought of them and whether I liked them. I’m not good at instant reactions to anything. I need time to take in what I’ve experienced before I can say anything intelligent.
I’m sure most people would have asked what I thought. But Karl didn’t. Another example of his difference from most people and of his sensitivity. He waited long enough for me to have a good look from various angles before he spoke.
“I know they are bad copies of the one we saw at the hotel.”
I said, “Some. Not all. But I wouldn’t say bad. And what does it matter if they are? Copies, I mean.”
“I wanted them to be a bit different. A bit more … my own.”
We weren’t looking at each other, but at the sculptures.
I said, “When you started as a plumber, didn’t your boss show you what to do and how to do it and then you did it the way he showed you?”
“Yes.”
“And when your dad taught you to fish, did he show you how and then you did what he did?”
“Yes.”
“Isn’t that copying?”
“Isn’t that how we learn everything? By copying people who know how to do it and show us?”
“Hadn’t thought of it like that.”
There was a high stool in a corner. I sat on it. Karl hitched himself onto the workbench.
I said, “When I was fifteen, I wasn’t regarded as clever, and I wasn’t much of a reader. But one day I came across a book I started reading just because I had nothing else to do. I don’t know why I picked it rather than another. Anyway, I started reading. It didn’t hook me straightaway. It didn’t have the kind of catchy opening that grabs your attention. I was well into it before this strange thing happened that had never happened before. I just couldn’t stop reading it. And as I read the last page, all I wanted to do was write a book like that. I wanted it so much, I started straightaway. I still have the story. It’s about eighty pages long. Eighty-one to be exact. It took me six months. When I read it now, it makes me laugh, because it’s so obviously a bad copy of the book I’d read. But it got me going. It showed me what I wanted to do with my life. It showed me what I am.”
That put a silence on both of us.
When the emotion had drained away, Karl said, “What you’re saying is something like that has happened to me.”
I kept my eyes, as I felt his eyes were, too, on his sculptings.
And replied, “Hasn’t it?”
How hard it is to admit to someone else who has recognised it before you have yourself, that something has happened to you, which will reshape your life. Perhaps because you resent that they have noticed before you have. Perhaps because such an admission reveals your deepest and most vulnerable self. The self we all fear someone will injure or hurt or destroy.
And it’s hard because you know at that very moment of recognition that your future is decided. That whatever happens, come what may and whether you want to or not, you will have to live your life in a way determined by your discovery of what you are and what you are meant to be.
At one and the same moment, you suddenly feel free—free to be who you are—and at the same time restricted, bound, unfree, because you can be nothing else. In gaining your freedom to be you have lost your choice of being anything else.
I sensed Karl was struggling with that very dilemma before he answered in a voice forced through a jammed mouth.
“Yes.”
After such moments of a truth declared and accepted, discomfort sets in.
What should you do? Break the ice by telling a joke? Change the subject?
I thought of suggesting we leave it there for today, but that felt like dodging the questions still hanging in the air.
All I could do was take the advice I’d given Fiorella: follow my nose.
“I’m guessing these are models,” I said. “D’you plan to make them the right size?”
“One or two,” Karl said. “The ones I’m pleased with.”
“Which are?”
He pointed to two. One very like William Tucker’s, the other a more complicated arrangement of entangled and almost knotted wires.
“And making them out of pipes?”
“The Tucker one. But the other one I’d like to make out of stainless steel rods.”
“And then what will you do with them?”
“I don’t know. Haven’t thought that far.”
“You made them on the spur of the moment because you couldn’t resist it?”
“I suppose … Yes.”
Pause for thought.
“Maybe,” I said, “the thing to do is make those two the size you want and then decide what to do with them?”
“Maybe … But is it worth it?”
So that was the question he really wanted me to answer?
I said, “Do you mean, is it worth you making them, or are they worth making?”
“Both, I guess,” he said.
Pause.
“Well … in my opinion, yes. It’s worth you making them and they are worth making.”
Oh, please, I thought, just do it! Don’t question so much!
And I was beginning to feel down. I’d forgotten the aftereffects of the ’flu during our happy meal and finding out what Karl was doing. But now started to feel queasy again.
I don’t know how I’d have answered his question because before I could try there was a knock on the door.
This injected a supercharge of energy into Karl, who shot off the workbench and grabbed the door handle, while shouting, “Don’t come in! Go away! Don’t come in.”
And Mrs. Williamson’s shocked voice replying, “I won’t. I’ve brought you some coffee.”
“All right!” Karl shouted. “Put it down. I’ll get it. Don’t come in. Go away.”
And Mrs. Williamson saying, “Yes, all right. I’m going. I’m going.”
Karl waited, then opened the door enough to check his mother had gone.
Now, I’m slow to anger, which is just as well, because I’m unreasonable when roused.
And Karl’s behaviour roused me.
“Just a minute!” I said, or rather heard myself explode, for anger splits you in two, or at least it does me. The angry me being angry and the normal me observing the angry me being angry.
I was beside Karl and pushing him away before I could stop myself.
“What!” Karl said.
But I paid no heed, opened the door and called after Mrs. Williamson’s retreating figure, “Wait, Mrs. Williamson. Please wait!”
But she went on into the house.
I closed the door and confronted Karl and in a stern voice new to him and rare to myself said, “That was disgraceful!”
“What!”
“You should be ashamed of yourself!”
And then in a voice that matched mine, he said, “What the hell are you talking about?”
“That was your mother, for God’s sake.”
“I don’t want her in here.”
“You don’t talk to your mother like that. Never! Not for any reason.”
We were enraged bull to bull, close up.
“It’s got nothing to do with you,” he said.
“I won’t stand by and say nothing when you behave so badly to your mother.”
“It’s none of your business.”
“Have I ever interfered in your business before?”
No reply.
“Have I ever criticised you in any way?”
No reply.
“Have I ever told you you were wrong?”
No reply.
Karl turned away and leaned against the workbench.
I waited. Nothing.
“Have the decency to give me a reply.”
“All right!” Karl said with a wave of the hand that would have pushed me away had I been in range. “All right. No.”
I made myself calm down before saying, “Then give me some credit for that and listen to me now.”
“I don’t want her in here, that’s all.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t want her seeing what I’m doing.”
“Why not? You invited me to see it.”
“That’s different.”
“How?”
“I thought you’d understand.”
“And your mother wouldn’t?”
“Yes! No! No, she wouldn’t.”
The anger drained from both of us. I sat down and we declined into silence.
Now I was upset with myself for losing my temper.
They say you should never apologise and never explain, because it shows a sign of weakness.
Baloney.
That’s the cause of vendettas, endless cycles of revenge and the interminable abomination of war.
And I know something else. It’s the older, and the stranger, who must break the circle.
I forced myself to say, “I’m sorry. I lost my temper.”
Karl said nothing. Nor did I want him to. Mutual apologies don’t heal the wound, they only put a bandage over it.
I said, “Do something for me.”
Karl remained silent.
“Let me ask your mother to join us. Show her what you’ve done and see what she says.”
No reply.
“Put yourself in her shoes, Karl. You’re her only son. Her only child. She adores you. Quite literally, she’d die for you. I think you know that. She’s gone through a hell of worry about you these last few months. Now she sees her beloved son full of life again. And it’s obvious whatever has happened has something to do with what you’re doing in here. Don’t you think you ought to show her? Even if she doesn’t understand. Isn’t it the right thing to do?”
Still he remained silent, but took a deep, deep breath and let it out as if he were expelling poisoned air.
A few moments passed again before I said, “Shall I go and get her?”
He nodded.
When she was upset, Jane used to talk about “crying inside.” I thought of that when I found Mrs. Williamson sitting at the kitchen table, no longer chirpy, no longer the happy woman she had been during our meal, and everything about her betraying how hurt she felt. There were no tears in her eyes, but I was sure she was crying inside.
I sat down at the table, opposite her.
I said, “Karl wants you to join us in the shed.”
She said, head down and with an effort, “I hoped we were through with this.”
I said, “I think you are.”
She let out a heavy sigh.
“Then why …”
“I think this is different.”
She looked at me, a hard angry look I hadn’t seen from her before.
“Different?” she said. “What’s different about it?”
“He was rude. I know. But I don’t think he meant to be. I don’t think he meant to hurt you. Or reject you.”
“That’s certainly how it felt.”
“Yes.”
“Well, then?”
“I can only tell you how it seems to me. I’m not saying I’m right.”
She didn’t respond. For the first time I wondered whether Karl’s reticence, whether his refusal to speak when he was upset or facing a difficulty in himself, came from his mother, and not, as I’d assumed, from his father. Maybe he wasn’t so much his father’s child as his mother’s boy?
I said, “This didn’t happen because he’s depressed again. It happened because he isn’t ready to show you what he’s doing in the shed.”
“He showed you. Why not me? Do I mean so much less to him?”
She gave a huffy laugh.
“He showed it to me because I don’t mean to him what you do.”
“Well, I’m glad you understand it, because I certainly don’t.”
I waited a moment to let the sparks die.
Then I said, “When I was starting out as a writer, I hated showing anyone what I was writing before I’d finished it. I feared that if they said it was no good, I’d feel so crushed I’d give up. Especially if it was my parents who didn’t like it. Even when I finished it I didn’t want my parents to read it. Not till someone else had said it was OK. Someone whose opinion my parents respected.”
Mrs. Williamson gave me a searching look.
“Is he writing something then?”
“No.”
“So what is he doing?”
“I think that’s for him to tell you.”
“And he’s sent you to fetch me?”
“Yes.”
“Why couldn’t he come for me himself?”
“It’s too hard for him.”
“He didn’t have any difficulty telling me to go away.”
By now I knew she was being deliberately stubborn. Of course she understood! She was an intelligent woman. She knew her son. She’d been through worse than this with him. I was pretty sure this wasn’t the first time he’d been rude to her. I knew what it was like when you were in the pit of depression. You want the person closest to you to attend, but at the same time you want to be left alone. An emotional double bind. And you are hurting so much you can’t help passing the hurt on.
Mrs. Williamson knew this. But Karl seemed to be out of the pit now, and she had been shocked by his behaviour because she feared it meant he’d reverted. What’s more, there was hurt from those bad months locked up inside her, where she’d kept it while Karl was ill so as not to make things worse, and to show him that nothing he did, however bad, would turn her away from him or cause her to treat him as badly as he had treated her. She thought this was over, but his sudden rudeness had churned the pent-up bile, which she couldn’t help letting out a bit on me.
As for Karl, now that he was his best self again and something was happening to him he only half understood—something bright and new he didn’t yet know how to deal with—he was protecting himself in case this bright new thing was taken from him before he’d grasped it.
And me? I was an outsider, sympathetic to both mother and son. And quite often an outsider can see what’s going on between two people when the two people are blind to it.
There was something else I thought I understood, but didn’t mention to Mrs. Williamson.
Karl is an only son and I’m an only son. I’ve known others during my life. And have observed that they—we—tend to behave in one of two ways with our mothers. Some are deeply attached, tell their mother everything, and do nothing without discussing it with her. Others keep their distance, are reserved, tell their mothers as little as possible about what they are doing. I was of the second kind. And by now I knew Karl was too.
But unless you’re intent on deliberately hurting your mother, which I never was and I believed Karl wasn’t, there are some important things in your life you have to reveal. And just as I had to tell my mother I was trying to be a writer because of how hurt I knew she would be if I didn’t, so I knew it was necessary for Karl to explain to his mother what he was trying to do that made him closet himself secretively in the shed. I was sure he had to do this because I had left revealing what I was up to till it was too late. The breach this caused between myself and my mother was never repaired. I didn’t want that to happen to Karl.
I knew if it went wrong, neither of them would have anything more to do with me.
“Will you go and see?” I asked.
She smiled and said, “Course I will! Did you think for one second that I wouldn’t?”
I laughed.
We were friends again.
She got up.
I was going to, but suddenly felt quite done in.
Mrs. Williamson waited. “Are you all right? You don’t look so good.”
“The bloody ’flu,” I said. “Overdone it a bit, first day out. Enjoyed myself too much.”
“Have a lie down on the sofa in the sitting room.”
“Kind of you. But, if you don’t mind, I think I’ll just slope off home and go to bed.”
“You sure? Shall I get Karl to drive you?”
“No, no. You go and see him. Very important. I’ll manage. Really. Say good-bye to him for me, and tell him I’m sorry to duck out but I’ll be in touch.”
“Of course! And you’re sure you’ll be OK?”
“I will. Honestly.”
As soon as I got home, I went to bed and was a goner for the next five hours. When I woke, I felt like I’d been squashed by an avalanche.