Apparently innocuous
We all, surely, give ourselves away with our smallest, most apparently innocuous actions.
I once knew a man who insisted on serving his family their food at every mealtime, for forty years or more, so that he could ensure the best/largest/rarest portion for himself. And, having served everyone else their allowance of meat and two roast potatoes per capita, he helped himself to the rest, a great pile on his own plate. Putting himself before his wife, before his children and, later, before his grandchildren. His own appetites and preferences more important than theirs. And thus guaranteeing no possibility of seconds. He of course had no need for them. Away from the table too, he was a deeply selfish and controlling man.
(My mother was the opposite and always, to our increasing annoyance as we got older, took the burnt bit, the smallest bit, the bit with no filling etc. This was as telling).
He managed, this man, to combine this profound selfishness with an almost complete lack of humour and, finally, with a ponderous dreariness. An unfortunate combination. The latter of which you can do very little about. Particularly if your lack of self-awareness means you are blind to it and — by defintion — to yourself.
He was from a pretty staightforward family. Methodists. Brought up in an unremarkable suburb of London, he had re-invented himself in the home counties. With a wife who was equally humble of origin but far more charming than he deserved. Their new life was all tweed jackets and fake bonhomie and friends with tennis courts and Boxing Day drinks parties. A middle class version of an upper class life. With all the snobbishness and social anxiety that accompanies that. Their dining room was a facsimile of those they had presumably seen on the telly, with its canteen of not very good cutlery, still kept, after forty years, in its cheap mahogany box, and a too big table for a too small room with a fake bay window and red and gold wallpaper.
(Their eldest daughter sounded posher than the queen. Their nephew, who had inexplicably changed his name, such were his climbing ambitions, grander than the Prince of Wales. With a wardobe to match, despite his youth. And despite his being the son of a sweet humble mother who lived a simple life in a university town. Rather than the scion of an aristocrat, a destiny he would clearly have preferred.)
She was a naturally engaging woman, his wife. Or certainly considerably more so than he, low bar though it was. She was funny. Dry. Well-read. Absent-minded (one of the most underrated of qualities in a human-being). She too though was capable of being horribly selfish and was endlessly persuading her sons and daughters-in-law to spend more time with her, with them, than with their own families. This was dressed up as breezy spontaneity…. “oh darlings do pop in for lunch en-route to Lucy’s mother!” Then, when they succumbed (and they always did), increasing pressure would be applied to stay — for tea, for drinks, or maybe the night…. “just go there tomorrow!” Even if the parent-in-law against whom she was setting up this competition was widowed and alone and in far greater need of a visit from offspring. It was hard not to feel resentful of such behaviour. The pressure applied to spend all the Christmases and weekends and holidays with them. “Oh what a shame darlings, but at least be with us on Christmas Eve and Boxing Day!” But she was charming and probably (though not certainly) meant well. She needed to dilute the horror of her empty-nest life with her unloving, often cruel husband, one could only assume. She wanted others around and who really could blame her.
(Her old friends from childhood, her college friends, admitted many years later that they had lost touch with dear old Jilly when she married “the dullest man in the world”. Who knows why she did so. If only he had only been dull).
He was vile to her. Patronising, dismissive, undermining, unsupportive. She bore him four children and they too learnt, at his hand and on his watch, to be patronising, dismissive, undermining and unsupportive. Both of their mother and of others. Not always of course. They were all capable of concealing these family traits in public. Of creating an aura of charm and normality. But not often enough. Children learn by observing and the offspring of this man and this woman grew up watching a woman — their own mother no less — being destroyed. By their father no less. And children are often cruel. And join in. If given permission.
And what greater permission is there than a parent’s behaviour. So natural— indeed imperative, biologically — to ape and mirror. If your father is dismissive and worse of your mother, why would/should you do otherwise? Lessons passed down from generation to generation. Pain which knows no end until you take a conscious decision to end it. It seemed to some that their — this family’s — only conscious decision was to escalate it. And then keep same pain in perpetual motion. They had learnt some of the lessons of science. Just not all of them.
Two of their children inherited her gift for lightness, her ability to land a gag. Two didn’t and were as turgid as their father. That’s how it goes, the miraculous albeit random merging of the gene pools; the hat-pulling-outness of the qualities good and bad. The resulting cocktail. The long legs or the short. The tangled hair or the smooth. The sweetness or the sour. The pot-luckness of conception.
She had started to drink, his wife, their mother. A lot. When they were teenagers. Who knows, maybe before. And who could blame her. Belittled, daily, by her family. He was deeply ashamed of her resorting to the bottle (to dull a pain of which he claimed to be unaware) and, with the emotional understanding of a flea, decided to ignore it. Or as good as. He put a tiny padlock on the drinks’ cabinet in the sitting room. They called it the drawing room, of course they did.
(This derision about their pretensions seems mean and maybe it is. But understanding their desire to be and be seen as something they really weren’t is the key to them all. Their ‘poshness’ meant they had to hide that which they felt wasn’t. And human emotions are messy and unkempt and ‘not done’ in this most middle of middle class worlds they had made their own. Understanding this, all this, all this buttoned-upness, this desperation to maintain appearances, however false, however flawed, is the key to understanding their later almost absolute degeneration. Without an understanding of its roots, what transpired….ruining lives as it did…makes no sense.)
It was a book-free, wall-to-wall-carpet extension of a room, that sitting room. Furnished with mean sofas and repro Louis ‘coffee tables’, with nasty French doors onto the leylandi hedged garden. A garden which contained not a single vegetable despite its good size. A smaller, scruffier room filled with worn rugs and books, with rows of runner beans and lettuces and potatoes growing outside would have been preferable and warmer in every way. And, oh the irony, ‘Sloanier’. Which was their chief ambition as a family.
The padlock strategy did not work. Booze is available outside of the family drinks’ cabinet and an addict needs love and attention and care, not a ticking-off by a stern and unloving husband, embarrassed by his wife’s ‘inadequacies’ and ‘lack of self-control’. He pursued this strategy for over fifteen years. Over fifteen years. The padlock strategy. Apparently bemused by its inefficacy. Whilst she became daily more miserable.
As a brilliant and practised actress though, she could put on a brittle brave face when called for. When her public, any public required it. When being viewed. Who knows what life was like in that house when it was just he and her.
Brave faces, being masks, must slip eventually. And as the years went on her drinking became more obvious. Unhappy people need to dull the pain. Or at least attempt to do so. She was carried to bed after long dinners on family holidays abroad. She was accustomed, at home, to waking up during the night to down a great chunk of a concealed bottle of whisky, to kill the pain. And to usher-in the longed-for escape of sleep which so frequently evaded her. But, on holiday, disallowed the freedom of her secret stash, she ‘front-loaded’ at suppertime, to get her through the long night.
It was now harder to hide. But her family, trapped in and by the absurd British class system and unerringly reverential of and hidebound by it, chose never to talk about The Problem. Chose instead to brush it under their carpets which floated a foot off the ground so much contemporary and historical detritus were they required to conceal.
(They none of them ever spoke of any of their problems. Despite them being as legion as in any family. Their apparent closeness was artifice. They were a trompe l’oeil of a family).
Eventually he called a family symposium. He drove to London where his grown-up children and their partners had gathered. He delivered the news. Their mother was an alcoholic and had been one for many many years. They were shocked and saddened. Of course they were. It was haunting, devastating information.
A week later, Posher than the Queen was, with gruesome inevitability, already dismissing this news. Of course her mother wasn’t an alcoholic. He, her father, was a moderate man by nature and up-bringing. Her father was exaggerating.
So?…. her mother liked a drink — who didn’t? Posher drank like a fish. This was clearly a storm in a sherry glass. And thus the help her mother so desperately needed was not sought. Quiet words were had with the local GP to whose summer drinks they had been invited over the decades. “Keep it under your hat old chap… fearfully embarrassing”. Anti-depressants were prescribed.
And the news which had cost their father so dear to deliver to his children was effectively never mentioned again. (This was worth reflection. Maybe this had been his Damascene moment, his fork in the road. Maybe he had been trying, even unconsciously, to change the course of his family’s stunted emotional path. Maybe. But to have it so absolutely rejected, by his own children, must have been not only devastating but determining. He would never allow weakness or emotion to take centre stage again. He packed that box up, shut it with a crash, locked it and disposed of the key).
Her cries for help became pathetically, child-likely, clichedly, screechingly obvious. To all apart from those at whom they were directed. Who ignored them. She began to spend crazy amounts of money on crazy things. She shop-lifted. She undertook minor acts of vandalism, late at night, in their county town. Presumably buoyed up by booze. The anti-depressants were upped. The conversation never had.
When she died, tragically prematurely, a year or so later (caused, apparently, by a freak virus), the more self-aware of her offspring quietly acknowledged, amongst themselves, that — and they couldn’t necessarily explain this in medical terms, but they knew, they knew in their bones that it was the case — that had her problems been addressed, she would still be alive. Though even that rare moment of self-awareness changed nothing.(And that conversation, that deeply painful conversation was, mere months later, denied by those who had had it. Those present but not partakers however, would never forget it).
As the funeral arrangements were made, the family discussed to which charity they should ask donations be made. The obvious choice was a mental health charity. Or one which dealt with addiction. This was dismissed immediately. “What if people thought Mummy had had those problems?” The collective shudder put a stop to that absurd suggestion and the monies were donated to a horse sanctuary or something. The carpet rose another inch or two.
When, not so many years later, another female family member became “too emotional”… dared speak of her over-whelmedness and pain and agony, they closed ranks. At which they were so practised. She was pushed out, demonized, dehumanized and destroyed. Removed, debased. It was what they were best at. They were supremely good at it.
And she remembered that the carving of the beef and the keeping of the best, rarest, biggest bits for him had always concerned her rather more than it might have done. And she realized that she should have been more than concerned. She should have been terrified.
Maybe we all do something which, at a glance, tells the onlooker all they need to know. And maybe we should pay more attention.
* This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to a person or persons, alive or dead, is entirely coincidental.
