MY MOTHER DIED on 21 October 2010, at eleven in the morning, in her bedroom on the top floor of 15 Loudoun Road, the rented house in St John’s Wood where she’d lived for the previous sixty-nine years. I heard the news on my cellphone driving along a back road in Tuscany. I rushed home, collected my passport and flew to London, where I arrived at about seven in the evening.
The house had been neglected since my father’s death in 1995. A large crack ran down the external wall to the right of the front door. Squirrels nested in the roof next to the water-tank, and they’d reopen their hole every time we patched it up. I’d offered to make major repairs on condition that I’d be reimbursed after her death, but the lawyer told me, ‘It won’t happen. Buy her an umbrella.’
Downstairs in my father’s study, my mother’s attempt to organize his papers had replaced the creative untidiness of work in progress with the sepulchral untidiness of boxes ready to be taken to an archive. In the music room her Steinway was shrouded and the scores were shelved. In her last years she’d actually forgotten how to play. The back door from the kitchen to the garden, squeezed by subsidence, had been planed so many times to make it fit the frame that it was no longer a rectangle. The house was a tomb long before her death added an aura of absence to the surreptitious creak of decay.
Her live-in minder had packed a rucksack and was waiting with her boyfriend in the hall. As I kissed her cheek, I smelled the excitement of a witness who’d seen someone die. I wondered if the experience was as thrilling as observing a birth.
My wife was waiting for me in the piano room. We phoned for the undertaker. Then I went upstairs to say my goodbyes. I took a sketch-pad with me to make some drawings of my mother as she lay there. I’d done the same with my father and it had been a fascinating experience, but this time it didn’t work. The drawings came out angrier and angrier. Was this my feeling, or hers? She herself just looked exhausted. The anger was in the drawings.
By her bedside lamp lay a curl of papers. In a desultory way I straightened them out. They were documents designed to exclude me from my father’s literary inheritance. A covering letter showed that she’d arranged to sign these in front of the lawyer a few days later.
She’d been talking about this for years and I’d always told her she should do whatever she thought best. Would she or wouldn’t she? There was an element of sadism in my detachment. In the background lay a battlefield. She knew I disagreed with her interpretation of my father’s life. To her, he’d always been a pillar of integrity, and anyone who questioned this was despicable. I agreed about his integrity, but everything else about my father’s life made me want to qualify her pure idea of him with the confusion of reality.
I’d always expected her to change her mind about cutting me off, but here we were. Dutifully, I took the documents to the lawyer the following day. Were we obliged to honour her wishes? The lawyer flipped through the papers and asked, ‘Where’s the signature?’ I said that she’d planned to sign them in his presence – let’s see – tomorrow afternoon. ‘A lot of old ladies leave things just a bit too late,’ he said. And casually he dropped them in the trash.
All other aspects of her Will were fine. She’d left everything to my sister Lizzie and myself. She hadn’t created a foundation dedicated to protecting her husband from my interpretation of his life. The lawyer added soothingly that, as we were our parents’ sole heirs, the literary executorship was of minor importance. So I calmed down.
It took us ten days to organize the funeral. Lizzie had just flown from London to Sydney and she needed time to recover before she’d fly back.
While I waited, I sat alone in the piano room listening to the shuffling of the masonry. I looked through the boxes next door but they contained nothing that interested me. Then I tried the door of the tiny room downstairs where my father used to store all the papers that he felt he couldn’t throw away.
It was still untidy, but no longer the impenetrable chaos it had been during my father’s lifetime. The correspondence had been sorted into slim files stored in alphabetical order. Among them I found two packages marked in my mother’s handwriting, ‘to be destroyed without opening after my death’. One was shut with a strip of Sellotape. The other had also been shut, but somebody had sliced it open. I took them upstairs to the piano room. After an hour of dithering, I began to read the contents of the open file. They were letters from Raymond Chandler to Mum. After reading two or three, I realized they were passionate love letters.
I rang the lawyer and asked if we had to obey her wishes. ‘No,’ he said. ‘She had the right to destroy her property, you don’t. You could, but if I were you I wouldn’t.’
Raymond Chandler’s supposed passion for my mother had become one of the great ‘causes’ of her old age. A biographer had come across some evidence in Chandler’s archive and he believed that an affair had actually taken place. My mother went wild. Friends were asked to intervene. She who was so frugal spent hundreds of pounds on solicitors. In the end, the biographer gave in and the evidence was written up as a fantasy, but the letters I was reading in the piano room showed that their friendship hadn’t been quite as limpid as she’d always maintained.
While my mother was alive, I’d accepted her assertion that she was in charge of the past. She was the keeper of the flame, my father’s life belonged to her. She was obsessed by the thought that bad books would be written about Dad and lurk on library shelves waiting to ambush the innocent reader. Now, all those neat files would enter an archive. Wasn’t it my duty to present my parents’ lives in the best possible light, before hostile biographers started plundering them?
That’s what I thought, but a month after I’d started writing, my mother came to me in a dream. She was furious. ‘What makes you think you can write a book about us? For instance, what do you know about—’ and here she mentioned someone I’d never heard of. I mumbled an answer. ‘There you are,’ she said triumphantly. I explained hesitantly that if a book is well written, whether or not it’s the actual truth, it acquires a truth of its own.
In the background, my father sniggered. She asked, ‘And what are you laughing at?’ ‘Well,’ he murmured apologetically, ‘it only goes to show what he thinks of literature.’ I said that they were both dead, so they couldn’t be offended. The dead have no feelings, I said. My father stopped laughing and I woke up.
I lay there thinking how curious it was that they should behave in character, even in a dream. When they were alive, if my mother was determined about something, my father always backed down. But I wasn’t sure I understood what he meant about my thoughts on literature.
My father thought that literature should tell the truth. His poems were always built upon specific moments when life had been revealed to him in all its simplicity and nakedness. The poem had to bear witness to that vision and transcend the mere sentences of which it was made. The idea of truth was very important to him. In politics, which occupied a great deal of my father’s attention, ‘the truth’ meant one must never tell lies in the name of a higher cause, or sacrifice the rights of an individual in the name of the collective good.
These truths are complicated. Both, I think, involve ideas about England. But since I left England forty-five years ago, and since I refused to discuss any aspect of my parents’ lives with them while they were alive, what chance do I have of chasing the truth now?
At this point a memory comes back to me of my father’s study while he lived: the books and articles finished at the last possible minute, stuck together with tape and paperclips. The galley proofs, the glossy sparkle of the published version. To write a book is to embark on a quest, and if in this instance I’ve made mine more difficult, so much the better.